Researchers have found two important building blocks of human speech in wild chimpanzees, one of our closest relatives. A pair of studies finds that chimp communication includes both rhythmic ...

Humans are not the only species to combine concepts to build more complex meaning, a new study found. Bonobo chimpanzees combine calls in a manner similar to how humans structure words to make phrases ...

From Spanish and Swahili to Finnish and Filipino, over 7,000 languages are spoken across the world today. Humans are unique in that we are the only species known to use language. However, new research ...

Two studies of wild chimps point to the evolutionary roots of human language. The studies found that chimp communication often relies on rhythmic... Chimps' rhythmic drumming and complex calls hint at ...

The study of rhythmic structures, which appears in the journal Current Biology, analyzed the drumming patterns of chimps from the rainforests in East and West Africa. The trees in those rainforests ...

This next story could not be introduced by a chimpanzee, unfortunately, but chimps do possess some of the building blocks of spoken language. NPR's Jon Hamilton reports on two new studies that hint at ...