Julie Elie has spent a lot of time listening to zebra finches. Elie, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, ...

Why do humans have language and other animals apparently don't? It's one of the most enduring questions in the study of mind and communication. Across all cultures, humans use richly expressive ...

Julie Elie has been studying zebra finch vocalizations for years. Now, she has won the Coller-Dolittle Prize for progress ...

In the animated movie Up, a boisterous dog wears an electronic collar that translates his doggy thoughts into English words. “My master made me this collar,” he tells his new acquaintances. “He is a ...

Lions! Tigers! Bears! If only they talked! Just imagine how many prehistoric tragedies could have been avoided if humanity’s ...

Over the last decades, researchers who study animal behavior have succeeded in largely blurring the line between Homo sapiens and other animals. Like their human counterparts, animals feel emotions, ...

The idea of a device that decodes animal sounds — turning squeaks, clicks and meows into human language — has been a staple of science fiction for decades, popping up in everything from Pixar’s Up to ...

"Compositionality, in a nutshell: It's the fact that we can combine meaningful units into larger structures whose meaning is derived from the meaning of the units," Mélissa Berthet, a researcher in ...