Learn more about complex compositionality, an ability to combine words and calls that humans and bonobos apparently share.

Scientists have long considered the complexity of language to be an obvious separation between humans and all other life ...

Bonobos’ grunts, peeps and whistles may share an advanced linguistic property with human language ...

A peep from a bonobo is believed to mean roughly “I would like to…” and a whistle is believed to mean “let’s stay together.” But when combined to make a “peep-whistle,” it’s thought to mean something ...

Bonobos, our closest relatives, may not speak, but they use something strikingly similar to human language. A new study from researchers at the University of Zurich and Harvard University reveals that ...

Humans are not the only species to combine concepts to build more complex meaning, a new study found. Bonobo chimpanzees ...

This suggests that, like in human language, compositionality is a fundamental feature of bonobo communication. Furthermore, three of the call combinations bore a striking resemblance to the more ...

A new study finds bonobos combine sounds in complex ways, offering clues to the early roots of human language and how ...

To do this, Berthet and her colleagues built a database of 700 bonobo calls and deciphered them using methods drawn from ...

The ability to put together meaningful ‘words’ to form a ‘sentence’ with a new meaning was thought to be unique to humans ...