In their study "Vocal Learning in the Functionally Referential Food Grunts of Chimpanzees", Watson et al.[1] claimed that they "provide the first evidence for vocal learning in a referential call in non-humans". We challenge this conclusion, on two counts. For one, we are not convinced that the authors controlled for arousal (or at least they did not report such data); furthermore, the vocal ch...

XML is rapidly becoming one of the most widely adopted technologies for information exchange and representation on the World Wide Web. However, the large part of data is still stored in a relational database and we need to convert those relational data into an XML document. There are existing approaches such as NeT and CoT to convert relational models to XML models but those approaches only con...

A referential communication task conducted with five pairs of native speakers of Yucatec Maya produced evidence of “referential promiscuity” in the selection among spatial frames of reference (FoRs): speakers switched freely between FoRs and pervasively combined multiple types in single descriptions. In contrast, a recall memory experiment conducted with 18 speakers revealed a strong bias towar...