Scholarly debates about the nature of human emotion traditionally pit biological and cultural
influences against one another. Although many existing theories acknowledge the role of …

The bouba/kiki effect—the association of the nonce word bouba with a round shape and kiki
with a spiky shape—is a type of correspondence between speech sounds and visual …

Abstract Language diversity is under threat. While each language is subject to specific
social, demographic and political pressures, there may also be common threatening …

Modern phylogenetic methods are increasingly being used to address questions about
macro-level patterns in cultural evolution. These methods can illuminate the unobservable …

Humans have been using language for millennia but have only just begun to scratch the
surface of what natural language can reveal about the mind. Here we propose that language …

Cross-national analyses test hypotheses about the drivers of variation in national outcomes.
However, since nations are connected in various ways, such as via spatial proximity and …

Islands have played a prominent role in evolutionary and ecological theory, centring the
theoretical framework for understanding biodiversity in terms of isolation and area and …

Quantitative studies in linguistics almost always involve data points that are related to each
other, such as multiple data points from the same participant, multiple texts from the same …

Abstract Language diversity is distributed unevenly over the globe. Intriguingly, patterns of
language diversity resemble biodiversity patterns, leading to suggestions that similar …

Humans across the globe use supernatural beliefs to explain the world around them. This
article explores whether cultural groups invoke the supernatural more to explain natural …