It has recently been argued that symbolic systems evolve while they are being transmitted across generations of learners, gradually adapting to the relevant brain structures and processes. In the context of this hypothesis, ...

Human learning, although highly flexible and efficient, is constrained in ways that facilitate or impede the acquisition of certain systems of information. Some such constraints, active during infancy and childhood, have ...

A core design feature of human communication systems and expressive behaviours is their temporal organization. The cultural evolutionary origins of this feature remain unclear. Here, we test the hypothesis that regularities ...

Verbs and other temporal expressions allow speakers to specify the location of events in time, as well as to move back and forth in time, shifting in a narrative between past, present and future. The referential flexibility ...

Contemporary semantic theories can be classified along two dimensions: (i) the way and time-course in which contextual factors influence sentence truth-conditions; and (ii) whether and to what extent comprehension involves ...