Vocal greeting behaviour in wild chimpanzee females

Laporte, Marion; Zuberbühler, Klaus

doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2010.06.005

Cited by 106 publications

(105 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…Three individuals were recorded when facing a stressful situation (separation from their mothers, first context: "distress"), while the other four individuals were recorded while begging to their mothers (second context: "begging"). Although highly challenging, recording infants in the wild is essential to evaluate the great range of environmental and social constraints known to modulate vocal communication [Baker & Smuts, 1994;Laporte & Zuberbühler, 2010]. Our research has been approved by the Uganda Wildlife Authority and Uganda National Council for Science and Technology and adhered to the American Society of Primatologists principles for the ethical treatment of primates.…”

Section: Data Collectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Vocal Signature in Wild Infant Chimpanzees

Levréro

Mathevon

2012

American J Primatol

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A large array of communication signals supports the fission/fusion social organization in chimpanzees, and among them the acoustic channel plays a large part because of their forest habitat. Adult vocalizations convey social and ecological information to their recipients allowing them to obtain cues about an ongoing event from calls only. In contrast to adult vocalizations, information encoded in infant calls had been hardly investigated. Studies mainly focused on vocal development. The present article aims at assessing the acoustic cues that support individual identity coding in infant chimpanzees. By analyzing recordings performed in the wild from seven 3-year-old infant chimpanzees, we showed that their calls support a well-defined individual vocal signature relying on spectral cues. To assess the reliability of the signature across the calls of an individual, we defined two subsets of recordings on the basis of the characteristics of the frequency modulation (whimpers and screams) and showed that both call types present a reliable vocal signature. Early vocal signature may allow the mother and other individuals in the group to identify the infant caller when visual contact is broken. Chimpanzee mothers may have developed abilities to cope with changing vocal signatures while their infant, still vulnerable, gains in independence in close habitat.

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Section: Data Collectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Vocal Signature in Wild Infant Chimpanzees

Levréro

Mathevon

2012

American J Primatol

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“…Several examples of this type of flexibility have also been observed in great apes, often referred to as audience effects. One study reported the flexible use of pant grunt vocal greetings by free-ranging female chimpanzees in the Sonso community of Budongo Forest, Uganda (Laporte and Zuberbühler 2010). These vocalizations are typically used by lower-ranking chimpanzees with more dominant individuals.…”

Section: Vocal Controlmentioning

confidence: 99%

Learned vocal and breathing behavior in an enculturated gorilla

Perlman

Clark

2015

Anim Cogn

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We describe the repertoire of learned vocal and breathing-related behaviors (VBBs) performed by the enculturated gorilla Koko. We examined a large video corpus of Koko and observed 439 VBBs spread across 161 bouts. Our analysis shows that Koko exercises voluntary control over the performance of nine distinctive VBBs, which involve variable coordination of her breathing, larynx, and supralaryngeal articulators like the tongue and lips. Each of these behaviors is performed in the context of particular manual action routines and gestures. Based on these and other findings, we suggest that vocal learning and the ability to exercise volitional control over vocalization, particularly in a multimodal context, might have figured relatively early into the evolution of language, with some rudimentary capacity in place at the time of our last common ancestor with great apes.

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“…For example, across development from infancy, chimpanzee grunts have been shown to occur in increasingly variable "contexts" that may suggest variable functions (36,37). Additional sounds in chimpanzees and other primates later in life also have been shown to be used in a variety of contexts (38).…”

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confidence: 99%

Functional flexibility of infant vocalization and the emergence of language

Oller

Buder

Ramsdell

et al. 2013

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

187

254

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We report on the emergence of functional flexibility in vocalizations of human infants. This vastly underappreciated capability becomes apparent when prelinguistic vocalizations express a full range of emotional content-positive, neutral, and negative. The data show that at least three types of infant vocalizations (squeals, vowel-like sounds, and growls) occur with this full range of expression by 3-4 mo of age. In contrast, infant cry and laughter, which are speciesspecific signals apparently homologous to vocal calls in other primates, show functional stability, with cry overwhelmingly expressing negative and laughter positive emotional states. Functional flexibility is a sine qua non in spoken language, because all words or sentences can be produced as expressions of varying emotional states and because learning conventional "meanings" requires the ability to produce sounds that are free of any predetermined function. Functional flexibility is a defining characteristic of language, and empirically it appears before syntax, word learning, and even earlier-developing features presumed to be critical to language (e.g., joint attention, syllable imitation, and canonical babbling). The appearance of functional flexibility early in the first year of human life is a critical step in the development of vocal language and may have been a critical step in the evolution of human language, preceding protosyntax and even primitive single words. Such flexible affect expression of vocalizations has not yet been reported for any nonhuman primate but if found to occur would suggest deep roots for functional flexibility of vocalization in our primate heritage.esearch on evolution and development of language has been devoted primarily to syntax, the uniquely human capacity to produce well-formed complex sentences (1-4). Additional work has targeted the emergence of simpler communicative structures and thus has shifted attention back in evolutionary time to an earlier possible split of hominins from the primate background. For example, research has considered the presumably earlier evolution of simple sentences or "protosyntax" (5). Other work influenced by recent trends in evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo) (6, 7) has focused on infrastructure for language, invoking capabilities logically more foundational even than protosyntax and presumably moving the communicative differentiation of hominins from other primates much farther back. For example, symbolic expression in single words beginning in modern human development at about 12 mo is a precursor to even the simplest syntax (8). Moving the evolutionary focus even farther back in time, joint attention-infant pointing with gaze alternation between an object and an adult interactor, occurring before the end of the first year-is deemed a critical precursor to words (9). Similarly, canonical babbling (onset at about 7 mo) is a crucial step toward verbal vocabulary because development and imitation of canonical syllables (e.g., "baba") is required for extensive word lear...

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Vocal greeting behaviour in wild chimpanzee females

Cited by 106 publications

References 42 publications

Vocal Signature in Wild Infant Chimpanzees

Vocal Signature in Wild Infant Chimpanzees

Learned vocal and breathing behavior in an enculturated gorilla

Functional flexibility of infant vocalization and the emergence of language

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