Orangutans’ Comprehension of Zoo Keepers’ Communicative Signals

Dezecache, Guillaume; Bourgeois, Aude; Bazin, Christophe; Schlenker, Philippe; Chemla, Emmanuel; Maille, Audrey

doi:10.3390/ani9060300

Cited by 6 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 56 publications

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“…The absence of sound-symbolic matching of the ‘maluma-takete’ type in the present study echoes the results found in research on great apes's comprehension of iconic gestures. When a human experimenter used a novel iconic gesture to refer to an apparatus, great apes failed to use this cue [35,36]. Adding a communicative training and an iconic vocalization to the gesture also did not enhance performance [37].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bo-NO-bouba-kiki: picture-word mapping but no spontaneous sound symbolic speech-shape mapping in a language trained bonobo

et al. 2022

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Humans share the ability to intuitively map ‘sharp’ or ‘round’ pseudowords, such as ‘bouba’ versus ‘kiki’, to abstract edgy versus round shapes, respectively. This effect, known as sound symbolism, appears early in human development. The phylogenetic origin of this phenomenon, however, is unclear: are humans the only species capable of experiencing correspondences between speech sounds and shapes, or could similar effects be observed in other animals? Thus far, evidence from an implicit matching experiment failed to find evidence of this sound symbolic matching in great apes, suggesting its human uniqueness. However, explicit tests of sound symbolism have never been conducted with nonhuman great apes. In the present study, a language-competent bonobo completed a cross-modal matching-to-sample task in which he was asked to match spoken English words to pictures, as well as ‘sharp’ or ‘round’ pseudowords to shapes. Sound symbolic trials were interspersed among English words. The bonobo matched English words to pictures with high accuracy, but did not show any evidence of spontaneous sound symbolic matching. Our results suggest that speech exposure/comprehension alone cannot explain sound symbolism. This lends plausibility to the hypothesis that biological differences between human and nonhuman primates could account for the putative human specificity of this effect.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bo-NO-bouba-kiki: picture-word mapping but no spontaneous sound symbolic speech-shape mapping in a language trained bonobo

et al. 2022

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“…To evaluate this pragmatically enriched model, we want to focus on some peculiar differences that have been reported for the communicative abilities of great apes and humans. Numerous studies have shown that great apes struggle to spontaneously understand ambiguous signals, for example, pointing or novel iconic gestures [10,[80][81][82][83][84][85][86][87][88] (with some particular exceptions [89,90]). That is, when confronted with a novel gesture or a new context, great apes usually fail to spontaneously use the gesture.…”

Section: Pragmatics As An Amplifiermentioning

confidence: 99%

Great ape communication as contextual social inference: a computational modelling perspective

Bohn

Liebal

Oña

et al. 2022

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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Human communication has been described as a contextual social inference process. Research into great ape communication has been inspired by this view to look for the evolutionary roots of the social, cognitive and interactional processes involved in human communication. This approach has been highly productive, yet it is partly compromised by the widespread focus on how great apes use and understand individual signals. This paper introduces a computational model that formalizes great ape communication as a multi-faceted social inference process that integrates (a) information contained in the signals that make up an utterance, (b) the relationship between communicative partners and (c) the social context. This model makes accurate qualitative and quantitative predictions about real-world communicative interactions between semi-wild-living chimpanzees. When enriched with a pragmatic reasoning process, the model explains repeatedly reported differences between humans and great apes in the interpretation of ambiguous signals (e.g. pointing or iconic gestures). This approach has direct implications for observational and experimental studies of great ape communication and provides a new tool for theorizing about the evolution of uniquely human communication. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Revisiting the human ‘interaction engine’: comparative approaches to social action coordination’.

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“…To evaluate this pragmatically enriched model, we want to use it to explain some peculiar differences that have been reported for the communicative abilities of great apes and humans. Numerous studies have shown that great apes struggle to spontaneously understand ambiguous gestures, for example, pointing or novel iconic gestures [9,[64][65][66][67][68][69][70][71] (with some particular exceptions [72,73]). These findings are peculiar because these gestures are naturally meaningful in that they either index (pointing) or resemble (iconic gestures) the referent.…”

Section: Pragmatics As An Amplifier In Human Communicationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Great ape communication as contextual social inference: a computational modeling perspective

Bohn¹,

Liebal²,

Tessler³

2021

Preprint

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Human communication has been described as a contextual social inference process. Research into great ape communication has been inspired by this view to look for the evolutionary roots of the social, cognitive, and interactional processes involved in human communication. This approach has been highly productive, yet it is often compromised by a too-narrow focus on how great apes use and understand individual signals. In this paper, we introduce a computational model that formalizes great ape communication as a multi-faceted social inference process that relies on information contained in the signal, the relationship between communicative partners, and the social context. This model makes accurate qualitative and quantitative predictions about real-world communicative interactions between semi-wild-living chimpanzees. When enriched with a pragmatic reasoning process, the model explains repeatedly reported differences between humans and great apes in the interpretation of ambiguous signals (e.g. pointing gestures). This approach has direct implications for observational and experimental studies of great ape communication and provides a new tool for theorizing about the evolution of uniquely human communication.

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Orangutans’ Comprehension of Zoo Keepers’ Communicative Signals

Cited by 6 publications

References 56 publications

Bo-NO-bouba-kiki: picture-word mapping but no spontaneous sound symbolic speech-shape mapping in a language trained bonobo

Bo-NO-bouba-kiki: picture-word mapping but no spontaneous sound symbolic speech-shape mapping in a language trained bonobo

Great ape communication as contextual social inference: a computational modelling perspective

Great ape communication as contextual social inference: a computational modeling perspective

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