MPI Colloquium Prof. Katie Slocombe

The evolution of language: what do chimps have to say?

Abstract

One of the key elements of human communication is reference: we direct others attention to specific objects and events in the world with referential pointing gestures and with referential words. The evolutionary origins of this crucial aspect of human communication have been long debated. In the vocal domain, non-human primate alarm calls and food calls have been identified as ‘functionally referential’, in that acoustically distinct calls are given to specific events and listeners respond as if they understand the referent of the call. Although on the surface these primate calls seem analogous to human referential words, it is unclear if the psychological mechanisms underpinning the production of the calls is similar. I will present a series of studies investigating chimpanzee food calls, which first establish that they function referentially, before examining two aspects of flexibility in the production of these calls. Together these studies show that the psychological processes underlying the production of functionally referential calls in one of our closest relatives may be more flexible and have more similarities to those involved in language production than previously thought. In the gestural domain, although captive great apes readily produce referential pointing gestures for human caretakers, these gestures, like their gestures produced to conspecifics, are imperative in nature (i.e. the producer wants the receiver to do something for them (e.g. give me that, come here, go away)). In contrast, humans often produce declarative referential showing and pointing gestures by their first birthday, with the motivation of pointing out something of interest, or to share attention about the object or event. I present a new observation of wild chimpanzees producing a showing gesture with a likely declarative motivation and experimental data indicating wild chimpanzees engage in joint attention events. In summary, I hope to show that moving beyond surface behaviours and trying to understand the psychological processes underpinning behaviour in our primate cousins is crucial to tracing the evolutionary roots of our remarkable communication system.

Short Biography

Graduated from University of Nottingham before completing a PhD at the University of St Andrews. Stayed to do two years post-doctoral work with the Evolutionary Psychology group in St Andrews before joining York. Research interests centre around using the comparative approach to understand how key aspects of human cognition evolved, including human language. Her previous work focusses on chimpanzee vocal communication and in particular, the extent to which our closest living relatives can use calls to refer to objects and events in the external environment and the psychological mechanisms underlying call production. This behavioural work has been conducted with both wild and captive populations of chimpanzees. Current core research topics include multimodal communication and joint attention in chimpanzees and human infants, cognition in parrots and corvids and chimpanzee welfare. 

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If you would like to meet with Katie Slocombe on January 17, 2023, please contact limor.raviv [at] mpi.nl (Limor[dot]Raviv[at]mpi[dot]nl)