![]() ![]() The gestures of ‘ape language’ subjects were often used in ways that were unambiguously intentional, and no clear limit on repertoire size was noted. With human help, great apes were shown able to acquire repertoires of tens or hundreds of gestures, which were certainly not species-typical since they were part of American Sign Language (Gardner et al. The productive, open characteristic of human language is entirely missing in non-human primate repertoires (Hockett 1960).Ĭonsiderable excitement, therefore, has been generated by the discovery that gestural communication in great apes is more flexible and apparently under greater voluntary control. Even home-rearing by humans intent on teaching the words of language produces almost no change in the vocal repertoire of the chimpanzee (Hayes 1951 Kellogg and Kellogg 1933). But call types themselves are species-typical, and the set cannot be augmented. True, the appropriate circumstances in which to call and the class of referent to which a call is given changes with experience (Seyfarth and Cheney 1986), and a caller may learn when to keep silent, when to call and how loudly (Hauser 1992). Most striking of all, the vocal repertoire of monkeys and apes is to all intents and purposes fixed. Referentiality appears to be functional rather than intentional (Cheney and Seyfarth 1990 Hauser 1996), and the best interpretation of functionally referential calls remains disputed (e.g. Syntax is missing (but see Arnold and Zuberbühler 2006, 2008), and referential usage is limited to narrow classes of objects, such as major predators or foods. Gorilla gestures are not, however, inflexible signals but are employed for intentional communication to specific individuals.įifty years of modern research on the vocalizations of monkeys and apes has revealed many fascinating aspects of animal cognition, but has shown that the auditory communication systems of non-human primates are very unlike human language (Cheney and Seyfarth 1996 Hauser et al. We conclude that gorilla gestural communication is based on a species-typical repertoire, like those of most other mammalian species but very much larger. Thus, it would be unwarranted to divide ape gestural repertoires into ‘innate, species-typical, inflexible reactions’ and ‘individually learned, intentional, flexible communication’. When using both classes of gesture, gorillas paid specific attention to the attentional state of their audience. gestures derived from species-typical displays, were used as intentionally and almost as flexibly as gestures whose form was consistent with learning by ritualization. Many gestures whose form ruled out such an origin, i.e. No support was found for the ontogenetic ritualization hypothesis as the chief means of acquisition of gestures. Six gestures appeared to be traditions within single social groups, but overall concordance in repertoires was almost as high between as within social groups. Indications of cultural learning were few, though not absent. Only one gesture was idiosyncratic to a single individual, and was given only to humans. Most repertoire differences between individuals and sites were explicable as a consequence of environmental affordances and sampling effects: overall gesture frequency was a good predictor of universality of occurrence. This indicated a repertoire of 102 gesture types. Cases of potential gesture use, totalling 9,540, were filtered by strict criteria for intentionality, giving a corpus of 5,250 instances of intentional gesture use. Social groups of gorillas were observed in three captive facilities and one African field site. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |