| 1990 | - | Natural language and natural selection - Pinker,Bloom | :: | 168 |
| 1997 | - | The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain - Deacon | :: | 142 |
| 1999 | - | The evolution of language - Nowak,Krakauer | :: | 93 |
| 2001 | - | Evolution of universal grammar - Nowak,Komarova,Niyogi | :: | 90 |
| 2002 | - | Learning, Bottlenecks and the Evolution of Recursive Syntax - Kirby | :: | 86 |
| 2002 | - | The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve? - Hauser,Chomsky,Fitch | :: | 82 |
| 2000 | - | The evolution of syntactic communication - Nowak,Plotkin,Jansen | :: | 81 |
| 1999 | - | Function, Selection and Innateness: the Emergence of Language Universals - Kirby | :: | 76 |
| 2002 | - | Natural Language from Artificial Life - Kirby | :: | 67 |
| 2002 | - | Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution - Jackendoff | :: | 59 |
| 1997 | - | The Major Transitions in Evolution - Maynard-Smith,Szathmary | :: | 57 |
| 1980 | - | Rules and representations - Chomsky | :: | 55 |
| 2002 | - | Compositional Syntax from Cultural Transmission - Brighton | :: | 53 |
| 1990 | - | How monkeys see the world: Inside the mind of another species - Cheney,Seyfarth | :: | 52 |
| 1896 | - | A new factor in evolution - Baldwin | :: | 37 |
| 2000 | - | Grammatical Acquisition: Inductive Bias and Coevolution of Language and the Language Acquisition Device - Briscoe | :: | 36 |
| 1998 | - | Protolanguage as a holistic system for social interaction - Wray | :: | 36 |
| 1990 | - | Nativist and functional explanations in language acquisition - Hurford | :: | 26 |
| 1960 | - | The origin of speech - Hockett | :: | 24 |
| 1996 | - | Statistical learning by 8-month-old infants - Saffran,Aslin,Newport | :: | 24 |
| 2000 | - | The evolution of speech: a comparative review - Fitch | :: | 24 |
| 2003 | - | Complex Systems in Language Evolution: the cultural emergence of compositional structure - Smith,Brighton,Kirby | :: | 20 |
| 1999 | - | An error limit for the evolution of language - Nowak,Krakauer,Dress | :: | 19 |
| 2003 | - | How the poverty of the stimulus solves the poverty of the stimulus - Zuidema | :: | 18 |
| 2004 | - | The evolution of vocabulary - Smith | :: | 17 |
| 2001 | - | Segmentation of the speech stream in a non-human primate: statistical learning in cotton-top tamarins - Hauser,Newport,Aslin | :: | 16 |
| 2007 | - | Innateness and culture in the evolution of language - Kirby,Dowman,Griffiths | :: | 14 |
| 1973 | - | Abductive and deductive change - Andersen | :: | 14 |
| 2004 | - | Computational constraints on syntactic processing in a nonhuman primate - Fitch,Hauser | :: | 13 |
| 2005 | - | Cultural Selection for Learnability: Three principles underlying the view that language adapts to be learnable - Brighton,Kirby,Smith | :: | 13 |
| 2002 | - | Empirical assessment of stimulus poverty arguments - Pullum,Scholz | :: | 13 |
| 1995 | - | Bird song: biological themes and variations - Catchpole,Slater | :: | 11 |
| 2005 | - | The Self-Organization of Speech Sounds - Oudeyer | :: | 11 |
| 2003 | - | Simplicity as a Driving Force in Linguistic Evolution - Brighton | :: | 10 |
| 2003 | - | Grammatical Assimilation - Briscoe | :: | 10 |
| 1973 | - | The logic of animal conflict - Maynard-Smith,Price | :: | 8 |
| 1975 | - | The evolution of an evolutionist - Waddington | :: | 8 |
| 2000 | - | How Children Learn the Meanings of Words - Bloom | :: | 8 |
| 2002 | - | A syntactic rule in forest monkey communication - Zuberbuhler | :: | 8 |
| 1996 | - | Do apes ape - Tomasello | :: | 7 |
| 2007 | - | Language evolution by iterated learning with Bayesian agents - Griffiths,Kalish | :: | 6 |
| 2001 | - | Compositionality - Krifka | :: | 6 |
| 2005 | - | A Bayesian view of language evolution by iterated learning - Griffiths,Kalish | :: | 6 |
| 2008 | - | Language as shaped by the brain - Christiansen,Chater | :: | 5 |
| 2005 | - | The second inheritance system of chimpanzees and humans - Whiten | :: | 5 |
| 2006 | - | Recursive syntactic pattern learning by songbirds - Gentner,Fenn,Margoliash,Nusbaum | :: | 5 |
| 1993 | - | On the meaning of alarm calls: functional reference in an avian vocal system - Evans,Evans,Marler | :: | 5 |
| 2005 | - | Regularizing Unpredictable Variation: The Roles of Adult and Child Learners in Language Formation and Change - Hudson-Kam,Newport | :: | 5 |
| 1997 | - | The ontogeny of chimpanzee gestural signals: a comparison across groups and generations - Tomasello,Call,Warren,Frost,Carpenter,Nagell | :: | 5 |
| 2008 | - | Theoretical and empirical evidence for the impact of inductive biases on cultural evolution - Griffiths,Kalish,Lewandowsky | :: | 4 |
| 2004 | - | The bengalese finch: a window on the behavioral neurobiology of birdsong syntax - Okanoya | :: | 3 |
| 1997 | - | Intentionality and word learning - Bloom | :: | 3 |
| 2008 | - | Cumulative cultural evolution in the laboratory: An experimental approach to the origins of structure in human language - Kirby,Cornish,Smith | :: | 3 |
| 2003 | - | Simplicity: a unifying principle in cognitive science - Chater,Chater | :: | 3 |
| 1985 | - | On evolutionarily stable sets - Thomas | :: | 3 |
| 1955 | - | Characteristics of some animal calls - Marler | :: | 2 |
| 2001 | - | Predator-specific alarm calls in Campbell's monkeys, Cercopithecus campbelli - Zuberbuhler | :: | 2 |
| 1960 | - | Sign language structure - Stokoe | :: | 1 |
| 1997 | - | Understanding the complex song of European starling: an integrated ethological approach - Eens | :: | 1 |
| 2002 | - | Variability and detection of invariant structure - Go | :: | 1 |
| 2004 | - | The gestural communication of apes and monkeys - Call,Tomasello | :: | 1 |
| 2000 | - | Song organisation and singing patterns of the willow warbler, Phylloscopus trochilus - Gil,Slater | :: | 1 |
| 2005 | - | The role of salience in the extraction of algebraic rules - Endress,Scholl,Mehler | :: | 1 |
| 2005 | - | Animal communication: vocal learning - Slater | :: | 1 |
| 2004 | - | Learning at a distance II: statistical learning of nonadjacent dependencies in a non-human primate - Newport,Hauser,Spaepan,Aslin | :: | 1 |
| 2004 | - | Learning at a distance I: statistical learning of non-adjacent dependencies - Newport,Aslin | :: | 1 |