Hermann Ackermann, Wolfram Ziegler
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Mark Atkinson, Kenny Smith, Simon Kirby
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Christian Bentz
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Richard A. Blythe, Alistair H. Jones, Jessica Renton
Cedric Boeckx, Constantina Theofanopoulou, Antonio Benítez-Burraco
Megan Broadway, Jamie Klaus, Billie Serafin, Heidi Lyn
Jon W. Carr, Kenny Smith, Hannah Cornish, Simon Kirby
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Jennifer Culbertson, Simon Kirby, Marieke Schouwstra
Christine Cuskley, Vittorio Loreto
Christine Cuskley, Bernardo Monechi, Pietro Gravino, Vittorio Loreto
Dan Dediu, Scott Moisik
Sabrina Engesser, Amanda R. Ridley, Simon W. Townsend
Dankmar Enke, Roland Mühlenbernd, Igor Yanovich
Kerem Eryilmaz, Hannah Little, Bart de Boer
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Hannah Little, Kerem Eryılmaz, Bart de Boer
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Jérôme Michaud
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Ljiljana Progovac
Andrea Ravignani, Tania Delgado, Simon Kirby
Terry Regier, Alexandra Carstensen, Charles Kemp
Lilia Rissman, Laura Horton, Molly Flaherty, Marie Coppola, Annie Senghas, Diane Brentari, Susan Goldin-Meadow
Gareth Roberts, Mariya Fedzechkina
Carmen Saldana, Simon Kirby, Kenny Smith
Carlos Santana
William Schueller, Pierre-Yves Oudeyer
Catriona Silvey, Christos Christodoulopoulos
Katie Slocombe, Stuart Watson, Anne Schel, Claudia Wilke, Emma Wallace, Leveda Cheng, Victoria West, Simon Townsend
Ruth Sonnweber, Andrea Ravignani
Michelle Spierings, Carel ten Cate
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Monica Tamariz, Jon W. Carr
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Simon Townsend, Andrew Russell, Sabrina Engesser
Francesca Tria, Vittorio Loreto, Vito Servedio, S. Mufwene Salikoko
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Keywords: vocal cultures, great ape call, vocal learning, infant behaviour, cumulative culture
Short description: CUMULATIVE VOCAL CULTURES IN ORANGUTANS AND THEIR ONTOGENETIC ORIGIN
Abstract:
Recently, several lines of evidence indicate that orangutans (Pongo sp.) – the earliest diverging great ape lineage – are capable of expanding their species-specific vocal repertoire with new (voiced and voiceless) calls. These calls are shared and learned between individuals of the same cultural community. Orangutans represent, thus, a desirable model species for the study of language and speech precursors within the human lineage, since human spoken languages are fundamentally characterized by being learned. In the first section of this talk, based on the largest and most comprehensive call database ever assembled in orangutans (currently comprising 9 wild populations across Sumatra and Borneo), and perhaps among any great ape species, we show that orangutan vocal repertoires across populations show a nested structure – a signature of cultural build up that indicates that orangutan vocal cultural repertoires emerge and culturally evolve through a process of “sound upon sound”. The identification of these orangutan vocal cultures raises, however, questions about their ontogenetic origins. In the second section of this talk, we present a case of extreme vocal malleability in a wild Sumatran orangutan infant (approximately 5 years old), who exhibits a repertoire 2 to 4-fold the size of that of adults. A modest dataset of less that 150 recordings collected from this young individual increased the known orangutan vocal repertoire hitherto described by more than 20%. This flexibility verifies that assemblages of cultural calls may be indeed acquired by infant orangutans and subsequently passed on through generations. Altogether, our findings indicate that vocal cultures in orangutans are real and may ontogenetically emerge through similar mechanisms as human vocal cultures. Like children, orangutan infants exhibit a latent degree of vocal malleability that expressively surpasses that of adults, and they experience a process of cultural trimming within their “linguistic” community in the process of development of the adult repertoire. Once present in our last great ape common ancestor, similar vocal skills would have allowed the rise and preservation of vocal cultures comparable at a basic level with modern human spoken languages.
Citation:
Lameira A., Kendal J. and Gamba M. (2016). Cumulative Vocal Cultures In Orangutans And Their Ontogenetic Origin. In S.G. Roberts, C. Cuskley, L. McCrohon, L. Barceló-Coblijn, O. Fehér & T. Verhoef (eds.) The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANG11). Available online: http://evolang.org/neworleans/papers/60.html