Chimpanzees have sophisticated "communicative language" like humans

Chimpanzees can flexibly combine and arrange pairs of sounds to convey different ideas or meanings — an ability that researchers have never documented in non-human animals.

By combining different sounds, chimpanzees can achieve sophisticated communication similar to that in human language, according to a new study published in the journal Science Advances on May 9.

Growls, screams and gasps echo through Taï National Park in Côte d'Ivoire. Researchers have found that chimpanzees here combine these different calls like "fragments of language" to convey complex meanings when communicating.

Chimpanzees can flexibly combine and arrange pairs of sounds to convey different ideas or meanings, an ability that researchers have never documented in non-human animals.

This system may represent a key transition in the evolution between animal vocal communication strategies and the syntactic rules that structure human language.

"The difference between human language and the way other animals communicate is really in how we combine sounds to form words, and how we combine words to form sentences," says Cédric Girard-Buttoz, an evolutionary biologist at CNRS in Lyon, France.

In the study, scientists recorded 53 adult chimpanzees living in the Taï forest in 2019 and 2020.

In total, the team analyzed more than 4,300 sounds and described 16 different “bigrams” — short sequences of two sounds, like a growl followed by a “bark,” or a gasp of “hu-hu” followed by a scream.

The team then used statistical analysis to map these bigrams to behavior to reveal some of their meanings.

Girard-Buttoz says his team is now trying to figure out whether chimpanzees organize their calls in sentence-like structures, such as subject first, then verb.

They were also interested in whether the animals were embedding bigrams into longer sequences of three or four sounds./.

(Vietnam+)

Source: https://www.vietnamplus.vn/tinh-tinh-co-ngon-ngu-giao-tiep-tinh-vi-nhu-con-nguoi-post1037684.vnp