Vocal functional flexibility in the grunts of young chimpanzees

Derry Taylor; Erik Gustafsson; Guillaume Dezecache; Marina Davila-Ross

doi:10.1016/j.isci.2023.107791

Vocal functional flexibility in the grunts of young chimpanzees

iScience. 2023 Aug 30;26(10):107791. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2023.107791. eCollection 2023 Oct 20.

Authors

Derry Taylor^{1

2}, Erik Gustafsson¹, Guillaume Dezecache³, Marina Davila-Ross¹

Affiliations

¹ University of Portsmouth, Psychology Department, King Henry Building, Portsmouth PO1 2DY, UK.
² University of Neuchâtel, Institute of Biology, Department of Comparative Cognition, Rue Emile-Argand 11, 2000 Neuchâtel, Switzerland.
³ Université Clermont Auvergne LAPSCO CNRS, Bâtiment Paul Collomp, TSA 60401, 34, Avenue Carnot, 63037 Clermont-Ferrand, France.

Abstract

All living things communicate yet only humans can be said to communicate using language. How this came to be the case is a fundamental mystery unsolved by contemporary science. Within a human lifetime, language emerges from a complex developmental process. As such, understanding chimpanzee vocal development is essential to understanding the evolutionary roots of language. In human development, language is directly built upon the early capacity for "vocal functional flexibility"-the ability to flexibly express the same vocalizations in different ways to achieve different functions. Primate vocalizations, by contrast, have long been believed to be relatively inflexible regarding both production and function. In this paper, we break new ground by providing evidence for vocal functional flexibility in one of the first systematic studies of early chimpanzee vocal production and function. This finding implies the developmental foundations for language are rooted in our primate evolutionary heritage.

Keywords: Anthropology; Linguistics; Zoology.