Bonobo or chimpanzee-pigmeu
A new study has revealed that Bonobos are able to create phrases similar to humans.
We (humans) have been able to talk effortlessly about an infinite number of topics. We must give thanks to compositional.
Compositionality is the ability to combine larger structures whose meaning derives from the meaning of their units and how they are combined.
For years, scientists believed that only humans had this capacity. On the other hand, it was thought that animal communication was mostly a mere random set of calls, with only rare examples of composition.
However, a new study last week in Sciencerevealed that Bonobos create phrases similar to humans.
By thoroughly investigating the vocal communication of Bonobos in its natural habitat, the Kokolopori Community Reserve, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, was found that vocal communication among the bonobos (our closest living relatives, along with the chimpanzees) is based extensively on composition, such as human language.
“A Bonobo Dictionary”
The investigation of compositionality in animals requires, first and foremost, a strong understanding of the meaning of individual calls and their combinations.
As the authors of the new study are written, it has long been a challenge, as it is difficult to access the minds of animals and relibly decode the meaning of the calls.
To respond to this problem, a new way of reliably determined the meaning of Bonobos vocalizations.
Researchers assumed that a Bonobo call may have different types of meaning. For example: it can be to give a order (“Run”), announce actions future (“I’m going to travel”), express emotional states (“I’m afraid”) or refer to external events (“There is a predator”).
In order to understand the meaning of each vocalization, avoiding human prejudices, the context of emission of each vocalization was described, using the emission of each vocalization More than 300 contextual parameters.
Then a complete list of Bonobos’ calls and their associated meaning was created: a kind of Bonobo Dictionary.
This was the first time the researchers systematically determined the meaning of all the calls of an animal.
Compositionality do Bonobo
In the second stage of the study, a method was developed to investigate whether animal combinations are compositional.
Numerous combinations of calls were found whose meaning was related to the meaning of their parts – a key characteristic of compositionality.
It was found that some of these calls of calls had a likeness impressive with the most complex composition structures of human language.
To determine whether Bonobos’ calls were compositional, a linguistics approach that predicts that, to be considered compositional, a combination must meet three criteria:
- Each of its elements It has different meanings.
- The meaning of combination is different from meaning of its elements.
- The meaning of combination is derived from meaning of its elements.
Four call combinations whose meaning was related to the meaning of their individual parts – a fundamental characteristic of compositionality were identified.
Each type of call appeared in at least one compositional combination, just as each word can occur in a sentence in human language. This suggests that, as in human language, compositionality is a fundamental characteristic of Bonobos communication.
Evolution of Language
As the study authors write in The Conversation, an important implication of this research is the knowledge it provides for the evolutionary roots of the compositional nature of language.
If our Bonobos cousins are based extensively on the composition, just like us, then it is likely that our last common ancestor has done so.
The new study reinforces the idea that the ability to build complex meanings from smaller vocal units had been present in our ancestors for at least 7 million years (if not before).
