The concept of kinship has been central to investigating the remarkably varied social structures of primates . Genealogical relationships between individuals are predicted, from the first principles of evolutionary theory, to be critical influences on the nature of social relationships . Sociobiological/socioecological theory in particular predicts that kinship should have primary importance fo...

Introduction This is an article about kinship, and more particularly the meaning of kinship, an issue that has characterized practically the whole history of anthropology from Lewis Henry Morgan’s pioneering studies, including the influential dismissals of kinship as a universal category by both Rodney Needham and David Schneider in the mid-twentieth century and the prominence given to Janet Ca...

The current study explored the effects of different semantic categories in kinship terms on similarity judgments, word extensions, and recognition memory. We compared Indonesian – in which sibling terms are based on relative age – with English – in which sibling terms are based on gender. In Experiment 1, participants saw triads of pictures of scenes involving kinship relations and were asked t...

Reverse addressing is an interesting realization of kinship terms in interactive, face to face communication. This descriptive study was proposed to examine the use of family address pronouns in Iran as a function of the classical sociological parameters of age, sex, and social distance. It investigated various aspects of reverse addressing as a vernacular phenomenon. Data were reported from th...

Kinship shapes female social networks in many primate populations in which females remain in their natal group to breed. In contrast, it is unclear to which extent kinship affects the social networks in populations with female dispersal. Female Colobus vellerosus show routine facultative dispersal (i.e., some females remain philopatric and others disperse). This dispersal pattern allowed us to ...

Our study looks at the effect of lexical frequency, lexical categories and phrase boundaries on syllable duration in Vietnamese. We use durational data to shed light on the status of some ambiguous lexical categories such as kinship terms and positional nouns, and to gather additional evidence on the behaviour of some verbs that have grammaticalized homophones. Our results show that high freque...