James C. Phillips, a scholar at Stanford law school’s Constitutional Law Center (and author of several National Review essays), has kindly forwarded to me an interesting new paper of his, “The ...

Humans can effortlessly talk about an infinite number of topics, from neuroscience to pink elephants, by combining words into sentences. This is thanks to compositionality: the ability to combine ...

This is a preview. Log in through your library . Abstract Compositionality, or the ability to build complex cognitive structures from simple parts, is fundamental to the power of the human mind. Here ...

To understand complex objects, humans are known to mentally transform them and represent them as a combination of simpler elements. This ability, known as compositionality, was so far assumed to ...

Wild bonobos – our closest living relatives – communicate using vocal calls organized in compositionally complex semantic structures that mirror key features of human language, according to a new ...

Scientists have long considered the complexity of language to be an obvious separation between humans and all other life forms on Earth. New research, however, suggests our linguistic abilities might ...