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https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1150618
INTRO: Chimpanzees may learn how to use some of their calls from the adults around them, in a surprising parallel with how human children learn words, finds a study from the CNRS Institute of Cognitive Sciences, University of Warwick and Taï Chimpanzee Project.
We learn what words mean from the people around us, and different communities use different sounds for the same thing. English speakers say ‘dog’ and French speakers say ‘chien’, and these sounds would work just as well if they were suddenly swapped. Until now, scientists have assumed chimpanzee calls are not like this: largely instinctive and fixed by biology, but the new study tests this for the first time.
The study, published in PNAS, focuses on the raspberry: an unvoiced sound made by chimpanzees, much like a person blowing a raspberry with their lips. The team compared how 91 chimpanzees, aged from birth to 55 years, used the raspberry call. They studied four communities of wild chimpanzees in Taï National Park, Ivory Coast, and four communities of orphaned, peer-raised chimpanzees at Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary in Sierra Leone.
Wild chimpanzees used the raspberry almost exclusively while grooming others. The juveniles at the sanctuary used it across a much wider range of social situations. If the raspberry was purely an instinctive call, groups would be expected to use it in similar ways wherever they grew up. The differences suggest chimpanzees learn not only to make a call, but when and why to use it... (MORE - details)
ALSO: Chimpanzees learn when to use some of their calls - with parallels to how humans learn words
INTRO: Chimpanzees may learn how to use some of their calls from the adults around them, in a surprising parallel with how human children learn words, finds a study from the CNRS Institute of Cognitive Sciences, University of Warwick and Taï Chimpanzee Project.
We learn what words mean from the people around us, and different communities use different sounds for the same thing. English speakers say ‘dog’ and French speakers say ‘chien’, and these sounds would work just as well if they were suddenly swapped. Until now, scientists have assumed chimpanzee calls are not like this: largely instinctive and fixed by biology, but the new study tests this for the first time.
The study, published in PNAS, focuses on the raspberry: an unvoiced sound made by chimpanzees, much like a person blowing a raspberry with their lips. The team compared how 91 chimpanzees, aged from birth to 55 years, used the raspberry call. They studied four communities of wild chimpanzees in Taï National Park, Ivory Coast, and four communities of orphaned, peer-raised chimpanzees at Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary in Sierra Leone.
Wild chimpanzees used the raspberry almost exclusively while grooming others. The juveniles at the sanctuary used it across a much wider range of social situations. If the raspberry was purely an instinctive call, groups would be expected to use it in similar ways wherever they grew up. The differences suggest chimpanzees learn not only to make a call, but when and why to use it... (MORE - details)
ALSO: Chimpanzees learn when to use some of their calls - with parallels to how humans learn words