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The reason for this might be the feeling of joint social group membership "Holiday" or "vacation", "to start" or "to begin", "my friend's cat" or "the cat of my friend" - in our language, there are different ways of expressing the same things and concepts. But can the choice of a particular variant determine whether we prefer to cooperate with certain people rather than with others? A research team led by Theresa Matzinger from the University of Vienna investigated this and showed that people are more likely to co-operate with others if they make similar linguistic choices in a conversation.

Changes of speech sounds during the Middle Ages shed light on how we process language Our language is changing constantly. Researchers of the University of Vienna found that, over centuries, frequently occurring speech sound patterns get even more frequent. The reason for this development is that our brain can perceive, process and learn frequent, and thus prototypical sound patterns more easily than less frequent ones.