Bonobos’ Call Complex shares a separate feature with the human language
Bonobos’s bad, peeps and whistles can share an advanced linguistic property with the human language
We man hear some sentences that man never heard it easily, Insert sentences within sentences To express the wildest ideas we can dream (“Seeing the hall during the room was walted Purple Purple Pinguming pineapple on the nose”). Such capabilities are not unique In the animal worldBut a new study does not absolutely miss: BonomosOur most intense relatives create call combinations that share key aspects of human language.
In a new study published on Thursday ScienceResearchers report that Bonobo communication is rich in a characteristic characteristic that linguists call composition. This refers to the way we chain words to compose larger structures with more difficult significance. Linguists divide the composition into two categories, a simple and more sophisticated version, and the researchers have long thought that there is only a higher level of human language. Previous examinations Some primate and some birds have been able to be able to be a “trivial” composition, which can be added along with words that each can have a specific meaning on their own, creating richer meaning (“baked cake”).
But the new research shows Bonobos, like us, seems to be something more further than that. Composition “No” don’t “” change others in certain parts. An example is a “baked pumpkin cake.” Here are the “pumpkin” and “cake” together to complete a new compound idea. This strategy achieves a stroke for your communication buck, according to the new author of Simon Townsend Autonomous Autonomous, who studies comparative communication at the University of Zurich. “That’s what we have evolved,” he noted, “to add the meaning we transmit this important nuance and complexity”.
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Townsend warns that bonobos’s non-compositivity is that they are demands of complexes than what we see in human language. However, he has argued that he represents a “other layer” from the apparent wall of human uniqueness that separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. And because it may be a relative relative that can be decisive, to understand how the language was created Homo sapiens. “It’s really exciting,” Townsend says. “Back in time and our last ordinary ancestor lived, he lived seven million years ago in African forests.”
Collection of exam data, author Mélissa Berthet, Townsend’s team’s doctoral researcher, turned to the same forests. He spent five months recorded bonobo calls in the Democratic Republic of Cocolopus Bonobo Resemination. These calls were “peeps” and “whistles” and “whistles” and “Yelps” called “whistles”. For each 700 recording, Berthet took a meticulous note from 300 different contexts: was another group near Bonobos? Did the caller feed, decorate, or rest? How did others react?
These details allowed schools to conclude the meaning of different calls based on context. Peeps, for example, seems to coordinate activities with other bonobos … “I would like to be …” can be a rough translation, as Berthet says. The whistles seem to be used to maintain group cohesion with sounds that indicate something like “let’s be together”. Scientists used the following context data data on a five-dimensional “map” of the meaning of each bonobo call; The calls closer to each other had more similar meanings. Using this technique, this was Lending from linguisticsBerthet and his colleagues built what he described as the most common calls of the Bonobo repertoire.
The team then examined the combination of these seven calls. This is why the composition arises: for example, a peep that a whistle follows “whistle-whistle”. By making combinations on the map of meaning, he was calculated that he showed four composition and beyond the three of them, adding the meanings of the two calls, there were no examples of three combinations that were not composer. Moreover, all seven of the common call types appeared in at least one combination, revealing the wider composition of Bonobos than in any other species that has yet been studied.
“Bonobospet” is likely that he does not well position in man’s concepts. There is no clear what Peep-whistles or how derived from the parts of his components (“pumpkin cake”). However, because the method of researchers comes from linguistics, where it has been used to determine composition in man communication, “sure (results) seem to be non-composition, at least in a mathematical sense,” Berthet says. “We’re not sure what it means.”
Shane Steinert-Threlkeld, the Computational Linguist at the University of Washington, who did not participate in the new paper, proposes another interpretation: unbeatable calls could be more than idioms. Perhaps their meanings are not at all when you want to “break a leg”, although researchers researchers believe that they are unlikely that the calculations are related to the meanings of non-combinations. Steinert-Threlkeld warned this method of linguistics, although innovative, “it is a little new to fully accept.” But he praised the unprecedented scale of data collection, calling the examination “that can be valuable and fully persuaded (those who must be done).”
Thom Scott-Phillips, the location of the European Central University of Hungarian, also involved in the study, also impressive its data set and method. But it is not comparable to the language that sells Bonobo calls. The bacterium also argues Sign of each other Using the combinations of molecules, it seems that most of this method meets the criteria without compositibality, whether it measures something else. “If they go and do the same work (with bacteria), and they don’t find it,” he says, “it would be a challenge for someone like me.”
Townsend says the composition can be more widespread than previously acquired, though particularly not special, bacteria. He and his colleagues expect their new observation approach, in which a researcher is much more efficient than a recording. “We still don’t know if the bonobs are special,” says Berthet. “We developed this method, we used it in Bonobos and found very fresh results. But maybe you can do that in other animals.”
