🚨New animal linguistics paper🚨
Together with
@geoffreymesbahi.bsky.social and
@maelmleroux.bsky.social, we tried to finally answer this question: Do titi monkeys have complex syntactic skills?
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
The As and Bs of titi monkey linguistics: why emotional communication is not the enemy
The alarm call sequences of titi monkeys (genera Plecturocebus, Callicebus and Cheracebus) have sparked important debates over whether they exhibit parallels with human language. Some researchers con...
We used a dataset collected from observations, playback experiments and predator presentations during my PhD. We conducted formal linguistic analyses derived from this paper:
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...
The ABC‐D of animal linguistics: are syntax and compositionality for real?
In several animal species, an alarm call (e.g. ABC notes in the Japanese tit Parus minor) can be immediately followed by a recruitment call (e.g. D notes) to yield a complex call that triggers a thir...
We found that alarm calls likely reflect the caller's arousal level at the time of emission of the call: A-calls encode high arousal (typically, when they spot a raptor 🦅), B-calls lower arousal (i.e., when any other disturbing event occur 🐯🦌🚶♂️)
But what about when these calls are combined into long sequences? We think that these sequences track dynamic changes in arousal over time 📈📉
What is super interesting is that listeners still manage to extract relevant information about the event eliciting alarm sequences.
👇See this playback of A-calls: the monkey knows immediately where to look!
We think it does so by making pragmatic inferences based on prior knowledge.
For example, titi monkeys know that raptors are the most dangerous predators and attack from above. When hearing A-calls (i.e., high arousal in the caller), listeners may infer the presence of a severe threat – most likely a raptor – and immediately look upwards to scan for danger.
In summary, the alarm calls of titi monkeys do not reflect external events, but the caller's emotional states. Moreover, sequences are not syntactic, but reflect changes in the caller's emotional state. So... Is the vocal system of titi monkeys worth investigating? 🤔
Our answer is YES!
While callers may produce relatively simple signals shaped by immediate emotional arousal, listeners likely enrich these signals pragmatically by integrating background knowledge and, therefore, engage in more complex cognitive processes.
In other words, emotion-based communication can give rise to sophisticated cognitive processes, particularly on the receiver's side, and thus, provide insightful insights into the evolution of communication - and ultimately, language.
