When we're born, do some words come factory-installed? A new study, published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, finds that many human languages use similar words to describe the same concepts. These commonalities, which exist between languages that are apparently unrelated and separated by thousands of miles, may challenge existing theories about linguistic evolution. "These sound symbolic patterns show up again and again across the world, independent of the geographical dispersal of humans and independent of language lineage," Morten Christiansen, co-author and director of Cornell's Cognitive Neuroscience Lab, said in a statement. "There does seem to be something about the human condition that leads to these patterns. We don't know what it is, but we know it's there."