Kanzi, a bonobo who featured ins some of the best-known research on communication by great apes, died on 18 March 2025 at the Ape Conservation and Cognition Initiative (ACCI) research center in Des Moines, Iowa, aged 44. https://www.iflscience.com/rip-kanzi-the-talking-bonobo-who-understood-human-language-78513 Kanzi reportedly developed a vocabulary of over 3,000 ‘words’, and some early research suggested he could understand…… Continue reading Kanzi has died
Tag: Evolution
We could acquire language 135,000 years ago
When did a capacity to acquire language first appear in modern humans? A recent (short) paper tries to answer that question. The paper is Linguistic capacity was present in the Homo sapiens population 135 thousand years ago, Shigeru Miyagawa, Rob DeSalle, Vitor Augusto Nóbrega, Vitor Augusto Nóbrega, Remo Nitschke, Mercedes Okumura and Ian Tattersall in the journal…… Continue reading We could acquire language 135,000 years ago
A human pattern in whale song
Researchers have detected in whale song a statistical pattern known as Zipf’s law. Zipf’s law shows up in human language and in the statistical distribution of many other social and natural phenomena, including the size of cities. However, the researchers say that this is the first time Zipf’s law has been found in sounds made…… Continue reading A human pattern in whale song
Dogs learn to spot word boundaries like babies do
If you hear a language you do not speak, it is hard to work out where one word ends and the next one begins. So finding the boundaries between words in continuous speech is a pre-requisite for acquiring your native language and for learning another language. A recent experiment found, for the first time, that…… Continue reading Dogs learn to spot word boundaries like babies do