Back in the 1970s, a chimpanzee named Nim Chimpsky took part in a Columbia University research study called "Project Nim." Project Nim was led by Herbert Terrace, a psychologist at Columbia who was ...

Human communication is a complex weave of words and gestures — a mix of vocal and visual signals. "People use vocal and visual communication in a very rich and combined way," says Joseph Mine, a ...

She spent her early years playing in the backyard of a small house in Reno, Nev., learning American Sign Language from the scientists who adopted her. By age 5, she had mastered enough signs to ...

Chimpanzees continue to learn and hone their skills well into adulthood, a capacity that might be essential for the evolution of complex and varied tool use, according to a new study. Chimpanzees ...

Researchers have found two important building blocks of human speech in wild chimpanzees, one of our closest relatives. A pair of studies finds that chimp communication includes both rhythmic ...

The study of rhythmic structures, which appears in the journal Current Biology, analyzed the drumming patterns of chimps from the rainforests in East and West Africa. The trees in those rainforests ...