Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology:

A new study led by researchers at the CNRS Institute of Cognitive Sciences in Lyon and the Taï Chimpanzee Project in the Ivory Coast has found the first evidence of arbitrary, conventionalised vocal communication in wild chimpanzees. This discovery narrows the perceived gap between chimpanzee and human communication.

The words of human languages are, for the most part, both learnt and arbitrary. To say that words are arbitrary means that, in a slightly different world, they could have quite different meanings. These arbitrary uses of words are known as linguistic conventions and vary across communities. We follow these conventions only because our peers do, and if they changed their usage, we would too. If English speakers had started using the German word ‘Hund‘ or the French word ‘chien‘ instead of ‘dog‘ at some point in history, those words could easily have taken hold. As Shakespeare put it in Romeo and Juliet (Act II, Scene II): ‘What’s in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet.‘

Until now, it was thought that the vocalisations of wild chimpanzees lack this kind of flexibility — that they are part of a fixed, species-wide biological inheritance. If vocalisations are not learnt, they cannot be arbitrary, since their users could not have chosen to use the same calls for different purposes. However, this new study challenges both of these assumptions, at least with regard to part of the chimpanzee vocal repertoire. [Continue reading…]