Rudimentary form of syntax present in chimpanzees

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25250/thescbr.brk770

Keywords:

Evolution of Language, Chimpanzee, Animal communication, Syntax, Combinatoriality

Abstract

Human language is a distinguishing feature of us from other animals. However, our recent work showed chimpanzees, similar to us, can combine vocalisations into meaningful, larger structures to create new meaning. These results suggest the building blocks of language may not belong uniquely to humans but may be evolutionary more ancient and inherited from our common ancestor with chimpanzees.

Author Biography

Maël Leroux, Department of Animal and Human Behaviour

Associate professor

Original article reference

Leroux, M., Schel, A. M., Wilke, C., Chandia, B., Zuberbühler, K., Slocombe, K. E., & Townsend, S. W. (2023). Call combinations and compositional processing in wild chimpanzees. Nature Communications, 14(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-37816-y

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Published

2023-12-01

Issue

Vol. 9 No. 4 (2023): TheScienceBreaker

Section

Evolution & Behaviour

License

Some rights reserved 2023 Maël Leroux

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.