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Category: Communication

Ocean voices: Sperm whales’ speech is as subtle and complex as human language, study finds

Ocean voices: Sperm whales’ speech is as subtle and complex as human language, study finds

The Guardian reports: We may appear to have little in common with sperm whales – enormous, ocean-dwelling animals that last shared a common ancestor with humans more than 90 million years ago. But the whales’ vocalized communications are remarkably similar to our own, researchers have discovered. Not only do sperm whale have a form of “alphabet” and form vowels within their vocalizations but the structure of these vowels behaves in the same way as human speech, the new study has…

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We’re speaking less every day

We’re speaking less every day

BBC Science Focus reports: The spoken word is in decline, according to new research from the universities of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC) and Arizona. Psychologists discovered that, since 2005, the average person has spoken less each year than the year before, by approximately 338 fewer words per day. That’s equivalent to a yearly loss of around 120,000 words per person, representing thousands of lost human interactions. “Small changes in daily behaviour accumulate over time,” said first author Dr Valeria Pfeifer, assistant…

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Jane Goodall (1934–2025): primatologist, conservationist, and messenger of hope

Jane Goodall (1934–2025): primatologist, conservationist, and messenger of hope

Rhett Ayers Butler writes: Jane Goodall, who revealed the intimate lives of chimpanzees and gave the modern world a language of hope, has died at the age of 91. Over the course of six decades, she moved from an unlikely young researcher in the forests of East Africa to one of the most recognizable scientists and conservationists of her time. Her patient fieldwork at Gombe transformed primatology, overturning entrenched beliefs about the uniqueness of humans and forcing science to reckon…

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Mountain chickadee chatter: Scientists are decoding the songbird’s complex calls

Mountain chickadee chatter: Scientists are decoding the songbird’s complex calls

Mountain chickadees are unusual in having more complex calls than songs. Vladimir Pravosudov By Sofia Marie Haley, University of Nevada, Reno I approach a flock of mountain chickadees feasting on pine nuts. A cacophony of sounds, coming from the many different bird species that rely on the Sierra Nevada’s diverse pine cone crop, fill the crisp mountain air. The strong “chick-a-dee” call sticks out among the bird vocalizations. The chickadees are communicating to each other about food sources – and…

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Chimpanzees are capable of complex communication, new research reveals

Chimpanzees are capable of complex communication, new research reveals

Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology: Humans are the only species known to use full language, which involves combining sounds into words and words into structured sentences that convey infinite meanings. This process follows linguistic rules that determine how meaning changes with context. For example, the word “ape” can be used in compositional ways to add meaning—such as “the ape eats” or “big ape”—or in non-compositional idioms like “go ape,” which takes on a new meaning entirely. Syntax, the rule…

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Chimpanzees’ rhythmic drumming and complex calls hint at origins of human language

Chimpanzees’ rhythmic drumming and complex calls hint at origins of human language

  NPR reports: Researchers have found two important building blocks of human speech in wild chimpanzees, one of our closest relatives. A pair of studies finds that chimp communication includes both rhythmic structures and call combinations, two key elements of spoken language. Taken together, the studies add to an emerging “early footprint” indicating how human language may have evolved, says Catherine Crockford, an author of one of the studies and a research director at the French National Centre for Scientific…

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The communication we share with apes

The communication we share with apes

Anthony King writes: There are few one-offs in life on Earth—rarely can a single species boast a trait or ability that no other possesses. But human language is one such oddity. Our ability to use subtle combinations of sounds produced by our vocal cords to create words and sentences, which when combined with grammatical rules, convey complex ideas. There were attempts in the 1950s to teach chimpanzees to “speak” some words, but these failed. And with no other living relatives…

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The race to translate animal communication into human language

The race to translate animal communication into human language

Arik Kershenbaum writes: In 2025 we will see AI and machine learning leveraged to make real progress in understanding animal communication, answering a question that has puzzled humans as long as we have existed: “What are animals saying to each other?” The recent Coller-Dolittle Prize, offering cash prizes up to half-a-million dollars for scientists who “crack the code” is an indication of a bullish confidence that recent technological developments in machine learning and large language models (LLMs) are placing this…

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What hunter-gatherer societies can teach us about group decision-making

What hunter-gatherer societies can teach us about group decision-making

Vivek V Venkataraman writes: The Dilemma of the Deserted Husband unfolded in the late 1950s amid a band of G/wi hunter-gatherers, a subgroup of Ju/’hoansi (often known as !Kung San), dwelling in the Kalahari Desert of Southern Africa. According to the South African-born anthropologist and Bushman Survey Officer George Silberbauer, a woman named N!onag//ei had left her husband, /wikhwema, for his best friend. Few were surprised. After all, /wikhwema was a temperamental and pompous man, and a bit of a…

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Elephants call each other by name across the savanna

Elephants call each other by name across the savanna

Marta Zaraska writes: Humans have a long history of inventing names for elephants. There is Disney’s Dumbo, of course, and Jumbo, a 19th-century circus attraction, and Ruby, a famed painting elephant from the Phoenix Zoo in Arizona. But new research suggests wild African elephants may pick their own names, too—and use them to call and greet one another on the savanna. Most animals are born with a fixed set of sounds for communication. A few, such as songbirds, can imitate…

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Sperm whale clicks could hide a surprisingly complex ‘alphabet’

Sperm whale clicks could hide a surprisingly complex ‘alphabet’

Science Alert reports: A recent analysis of a sperm whale’s vocalizations suggests variations in ‘clicks’ represent a kind of alphabet that forms the basis of a complex communication system. Members of the conservation initiative Project CETI discovered series of clicks less than 2 seconds in length act as codas – basic units (phonemes) of cetacean speech. The highly social mammals have previously been heard identifying themselves with unique patterns of clicking, but this is the first time a combinatorial and…

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We aren’t the only apes who can playfully tease each other, study finds

We aren’t the only apes who can playfully tease each other, study finds

Spontaneous playful teasing in four great ape species: https://t.co/MhRhkoFPOs @RossanoFederico @IsabelleLaumer @ScienceSquil #ProcB #ethology pic.twitter.com/pzuMbBdTGf — Royal Society Publishing (@RSocPublishing) March 11, 2024 Mongabay reports: Being silly and indulging in humor may sound easy, but our brains need to do a lot of heavy lifting to pull it off. Landing a joke requires recognizing what’s socially acceptable, being spontaneous, predicting how others may react, and playfully violating some social expectations. Until now, research on the complex cognitive abilities that underpin…

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How plants communicate with each other when in danger

How plants communicate with each other when in danger

The Washington Post reports: It sounds like fiction from “The Lord of the Rings.” An enemy begins attacking a tree. The tree fends it off and sends out a warning message. Nearby trees set up their own defenses. The forest is saved. But you don’t need a magical Ent from J.R.R. Tolkien’s world to conjure this scene. Real trees on our Earth can communicate and warn each other of danger — and a new study explains how. Injured plants emit…

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Unique voice prints in parrots could help birds be recognized in a flock, no matter what they say

Unique voice prints in parrots could help birds be recognized in a flock, no matter what they say

Max Planck Society reports: Parrots are exceptional talkers. They can learn new sounds during their entire lives, amassing an almost unlimited vocal repertoire. At the same time, parrots produce calls so they can be individually recognized by members of their flock—raising the question of how their calls can be very variable while also uniquely identifiable. A study on monk parakeets conducted by the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and Museu de Ciències Naturals de Barcelona might have the answer:…

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Unlocking secrets of the honeybee dance language – bees learn and culturally transmit their communication skills

Unlocking secrets of the honeybee dance language – bees learn and culturally transmit their communication skills

A honeybee is performing the waggle dance in the center of this photo to communicate the location of a rich nectar source to its nestmates. Heather Broccard-Bell, CC BY-ND By James C. Nieh, University of California, San Diego The Greek historian Herodotus reported over 2,000 years ago on a misguided forbidden experiment in which two children were prevented from hearing human speech so that a king could discover the true, unlearned language of human beings. Scientists now know that human…

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Human noise drowns out communication between dolphins

Human noise drowns out communication between dolphins

The New York Times reports: Mammals in the ocean swim through a world of sound. But in recent decades, humans have been cranking up the volume, blasting waters with noise from shipping, oil and gas exploration and military operations. New research suggests that such anthropogenic noise may make it harder for dolphins to communicate and work together. When dolphins cooperated on a task in a noisy environment, the animals were not so different from city dwellers on land trying to…

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