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Dr Katie Slocombe and Dr Anne Schel, of the Department of Psychology at York, examined the degree of intentionality wild chimpanzees have over their alarm calls. The study shows that chimpanzees appear to produce certain alarm calls intentionally in a tactical and goal directed way--they are not simply fear-based reactions. In Uganda, the researchers presented wild chimpanzees with a moving snake model and monitored their vocal and behavioural responses. They found that the chimpanzees were more likely to produce alarm calls when close friends arrived in the vicinity. They looked at and monitored group members both before and during the production of calls and critically, they continued to call until all group members were safe from the predator. Together these behaviours indicate the calls are produced intentionally to warn others of the danger. Dr Slocombe said: "These behaviours indicate that these alarm calls were produced intentionally to warn others of danger and thus the study shows a key similarity in the mechanisms involved in the production of chimpanzee vocalisations and human language. "Our results demonstrate that certain vocalisations of our closest living relatives qualify as intentional signals, in a directly comparable way to many great ape gestures, indicating that language may have originated from a multimodal vocal-gestural communication system."

Good for some basic definitions but doesn't give links to the actual data they are collecting in their projects.

Deaf children are able to develop a language-like gesture system by making up hand signs and using homemade systems to increase their communication as they grow, just as children with conventional spoken language.

Rhett and Link go through an entire day basically only saying one word. I find this to be pretty interesting for the first few minutes, but it gets boring afterwards. This is due to the fact that they end up using gestures (like pointing or mimicking) to convey what they mean. While it gets boring, there are some moments where they seem to understand each other perfectly. Other people also catch on, so that is pretty interesting too.

Based at the University of California, Berkeley, the Greater Good Science Center sponsors groundbreaking scientific research into social and emotional well-being and helps people apply this research to their personal and professional lives. Their website has useful resources for Safe Conversations, Word Acts, and fostering better social relationships.

Unlike dolphins sharks are loners from birth. However they still have an intricate form of communication involving vibrations that are inaudible to humans, body gestures and extreme aggression.

Teaching a baby to speak is more art than science. It begins with babble and almost like magic the child says mama and dada, then no, uh-oh, mine, especially mine. But sometimes children struggle to learn to speak. A team of linguists, computer scientists and psychologists in Britain think robots might help explain why that happens. They've created the world's first baby robot, DeeChee; white plastic skin and a smile of red lights and articulated hands that grab and gesture almost like an infant. Now, scientists hope that DeeChee's silicon brain will help explain what's going on in the minds of human babies, specifically, how sensitivity to particular sounds helps infants learn words.

Emoticons - representations of facial expressions using colons, dashes, parentheses and other text symbols - originated in the days of the telegraph as a substitute for the facial expressions, hand gestures and vocal clues for different emotions that humans pick up during in-person meetings. Because printed words alone can't always convey the full emotional meaning of a conversation, emoticons have evolved into a separate language, especially with the world increasingly relying on texting, tweeting and e-mail. Called Stickers, Facebook's emoticons were born out of more than two years of research into the compassion of Facebook members, then fine-tuned by scientists specializing in human facial expressions. And while they were inspired by evolutionist Charles Darwin's studies in the mid-19th century, Facebook believes they could be a vital part of human-to-human relationships in the digital 21st century.

Make someone's day with just the simplest gesture.

"www.emory.edu/LIVING.../Pollick%20de%20Waal%202007.pdf"

I couldn't get the link to work, but maybe this will: http://j.mp/9e2qBm

An interesting slide shows overlay between monkeys' area for mirror neurons and Broca's area in humans

Seems to have a security feature that's locked me out: Forbidden You don't have permission to access /Page/docs/.../Corballis-presentation.pdf on this server.