jterwill

It is exciting times in animal communication.

This is not just distributional information analysis in the sense that ‘tokens’ are grounded in other ‘tokens’. They’ve grounded these calls in naturalistic situational context. This is hard won data.

If I understand, the finding here is that bonobo calls are “non-trivially” compositional, e.g., the semantic embeddings of pairs of vocalizations point in different directions surrounding the base vocalization. But it seems there is no “trivial” compositionality in the sense that constructions like [good __] might point in a similar direction. I would expect this latter result. This seems like a conspicuous absence? Is this really compositionality? Not sure what to make of it.

Some interesting context: bonobos and other (non-human) great apes are believed to have more intentional and flexible control over their gestural repertoire than their vocal repertoire and that these gestural repertoires are larger. Human language likely evolved from gesture (or so some believe). So, if their vocalizations are in fact compositional, it may be a separate evolutionary prong.

It’s hard not to see this angle as making the capacity for cultural evolution very fortunate for us (or unfortunate for other species). What other animals can exhaust primary food sources and ‘quickly’ pivot to another?

I’ve often wondered how much rituals and social routines for affiliation and bonding drove for this capacity (which we often associate with lithic tools) as opposed to the need for food. Perhaps some of this is due to another scarcity: hair. How did hairless apes manage relationships without grooming?

They have tried this with juvenile non-human primates! For example, Horner & Whiten (2005) tried this with 2-6 year old chimpanzees. Clay & Tennie (2017) tried this with juvenile bonobos. Neither group overimitated. They do play, but overimitation is probably underpinned by the ability/proclivity to infer Gricean intentions, which non-human primates lack.

There is a strong normative element to this, as well as the play element you mentioned — I expect, as adults, we’ve all engaged in some form of overimitation as an act of conformity.

Maybe, but I still found this fun to pass around the lab, haha.