Flexible learning system allows humans to keep up with linguistic change, researchers find
Tuesday, November 6, 2012 - 07:31
in Biology & Nature
(Phys.org)—Unlike other species, humans speak to each other in remarkably diverse ways. Some of our 6,000 to 8,000 languages use clicks (!Kung). Others don't differentiate between nouns and verbs (Straits Salish). Still others pack a whole sentence into a single word (Cayuga). In comparison, the communication systems of other animals show precious little variation within species; vervet monkeys use the same communicative signals across their geographical range, just as honeybees, bacteria and every other species each have one way of communicating.