Chimpanzees are capable of complex communication: human capacity for language may not be as unique as thought above. Chimpanzees have a complex communication system that allows them to combine calls to create new meanings, similar to human language. Combining the calls creatively: Chimpanzees use four ways to change the meaning by combining individual calls in combinations of two calls, including compositional and non -compositional combinations, and use a wide variety of call combinations in a wide range of contexts.
Humans are the only species in the earth that is known to use language. They do this combining sounds in words and words in prayers, creating infinite meanings. This process is based on linguistic rules that define how the meaning of calls is understood in different prayer structures. For example, the word “mono” can be combined with other words to form compositional sentences that add meaning: “the monkey eats” or add the meaning: “great ape” and non -compositional idiomatic sentences that create a completely new meaning: “Ape Go”. A key component of language is syntax, which determines how the order of words affects the meaning, for example, how “go” and “ape gos” transmit different meanings.
A fundamental question in science is to understand where this extraordinary ability to language originates. Researchers often use the comparative approach to trace the evolutionary origins of human language by comparing the vocal production of other animals, particularly primates, with that of humans. Unlike humans, other primates generally depend on individual calls (called types of calls), and although some species combine calls, these combinations are only a few by species and mostly serve to alert others about the presence of predators. This suggests that their communication systems can be too restricted to be a precursor to the complex open combinatorial system that is a human language. However, we may not have a complete image of the linguistic abilities of our closest living relatives, particularly how they could use call combinations to significantly expand their meaning.
Study the meaning of Chimpanzee’s vocalizations
Researchers from the max planck institute for evolutionary anthropology and for cognitive and brain sciences in leipzig, germany, and from the cognitive neuroscience center marc Jeannerod (cnrs/université Claude Bernard Lyon 1) and neuroscient Research Center (CNRS/INSERM/UNIVERSITÉ CLAUDE Lyon 1) In Lyon, France remembered thousands of vocalizations of three wild chimpanzees groups in the Taï National Park on the Ivory Coast. They examined how the meanings of 12 different chimpanzees calls changed when combined in combinations of two flames. “Generating new or combined meanings combining words is a distinctive seal of human language, and it is crucial to investigate whether there is a similar capacity in our closest living, chimpanzees and bonobos, to decipher the origins of human language,” says Catherine Crockford, a senior author of the study. “The recording of chimpanzees vocalizations for several years in its natural environment is essential to document its complete communicative abilities, a task that is becoming increasingly challenging due to the growing human threats for the populations of wild chimpanzees,” says Roman Wittig, co -author of the study and director of the Taï Chimpanzee project.
The complex communication system of the chimpanzees
The study reveals four ways in which chimpanzees alter the meanings by combining individual calls in 16 different combinations of two flames, analogous to key linguistic principles in human language. The chimpanzees used combinations of composition that added meaning (for example, a = food, b = rest, ab = food + rest) and clarified meaning (for example, a = food or trip, b = aggression, ab = travel). They also used non -compositional idiomatic combinations that created completely new meanings (for example, A = rest, b = affiliation, AB = nesting). Crucially, unlike previous studies that have mainly reported call combinations in limited situations, such as predators, chimpanzees in this study expanded their meanings through the versatile combination of most of their individual calls in a great diversity of call combinations used in a wide range of contexts.
“Our findings suggest a highly generative vocal communication system, unprecedented in the animal kingdom, which echoes recent findings in bonobos that suggests that complex combinatorial abilities were already present in the common ancestor of humans and these two great species,” says Cédric Girard-Buttoz, first author of the study. He adds: “This changes the opinions of the last century that considered communication in the great apes to be solved and linked to emotional states and, therefore, could not tell us anything about the evolution of language. We see clear indications here that most of the types of calls in the repertoire can change or combine its meaning when combined with other types of calls. The complexity of this system suggests that it is somewhat Hominid communication: that complex communication, that complex communication is complex communication, which is the last complex communication, which is the last attitude of the background in the last communication.