Recursion, the process of embedding structures within similar structures, is often considered
a foundation of symbolic competence and a uniquely human capability. To understand its …

The question of what computational capacities, if any, differ between humans and
nonhuman animals has been at the core of foundational debates in cognitive psychology …

Influential theories have claimed that the ability for recursion forms the computational core of
human language faculty distinguishing our communication system from that of other animals …

Human language is a salient example of a neurocognitive system that is specialized to
process complex dependencies between sensory events distributed in time, yet how this …

Previous work suggests that human infants are capable of rapidly generalizing patterns that
have been characterized as abstract algebraic rules (Science283 (1999) 77), a process that …

What birds have to say about language | Nature Neuroscience Skip to main content Thank you
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Abstracting syntactic rules is critical to human language learning. It is debated whether this
ability, already present in young infants, is human-and language specific or can also be …

The construction of novel compound tools through assemblage of otherwise non-functional
elements involves anticipation of the affordances of the tools to be built. Except for few …

Human language, and grammatical competence in particular, relies on a set of
computational operations that, in its entirety, is not observed in other animals. Such …

The ability to abstract a regularity that underlies strings of sounds is a core mechanism of the
language faculty but might not be specific to language learning or even to humans. It is …