ArticleScientific reports2015
Vervets revisited: A quantitative analysis of alarm call structure and context specificity.
Article in Scientific reports, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 45 papers.
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45 citing papers in PubMed, 207 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Evolution of primate vocal repertoires: vocal systems as embodied capital for mediating within-group conflict.Primates; journal of primatology · 2026Article
- The As and Bs of titi monkey linguistics: why emotional communication is not the enemy.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2026Review
- Assessing flexibility in meaning and context in non-human communication.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2025Review
- The 'seet' danger call: an active nest warning in superb fairy-wrens.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- The Adaptive Significance of Tail-Flagging: A Test in European Rabbits (Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Gharial acoustic signaling: Novel underwater pops are temporally based, context-dependent, seasonally stable, male-specific, and individually distinctive.Journal of anatomy · 2025Article
- Emotion in Nonverbal Communication: Comparing Animal and Human Vocalizations and Human Text Messages.Emotion review : journal of the International Society for Research on Emotion · 2025Article
- Sex differences in the acoustic structure of terrestrial alarm calls in vervet monkeys (Chlorocebus pygerythrus).American journal of primatology · 2025Article
- Loud Call Production in Male Vervet Monkeys (International journal of primatology · 2025Article
- Snake-like bird hisses induce anti-predator responses in a frog.BMC ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Sounds like a fight: listeners can infer behavioural contexts from spontaneous nonverbal vocalisations.Cognition & emotion · 2024Article
- From emotional signals to symbols.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Context-dependent alarm responses in wild vervet monkeys.Animal cognition · 2023Article
- Communication for collaborative computation: two major transitions in human evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Review
- A review of functional MRI application for brain research of Chinese language processing.Magnetic resonance letters · 2023Review
- Animal linguistics: a primer.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2023Article
- Comprehension of own and other species' alarm calls in sooty mangabey vocal development.Behavioral ecology and sociobiology · 2023Article
- Vocal expression of emotional arousal across two call types in young rhesus macaques.Animal behaviour · 2022Article
- Preliminary evidence for one-trial social learning of vervet monkey alarm calling.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The alarm calls of vervet monkeys (Chlorocebus pygerythrus) constitute the classic textbook example of semantic communication in nonhuman animals, as vervet monkeys give acoustically distinct calls to different predators and these calls elicit appropriate responses in conspecifics. They also give similar sounding calls in aggressive contexts, however. Despite the central role the vervet alarm calls have played for understanding the evolution of communication, a comprehensive, quantitative analysis of the acoustic structure of these calls was lacking. We used 2-step cluster analysis to identify objective call types and discriminant function analysis to assess context specificity. Alarm calls given in response to leopards, eagles, and snakes could be well distinguished, while the inclusion of calls given in aggressive contexts yielded some overlap, specifically between female calls given to snakes, eagles and during aggression, as well as between male vervet barks (additionally recorded in South Africa) in leopard and aggressive contexts. We suggest that both cognitive appraisal of the situation and internal state contribute to the variation in call usage and structure. While the semantic properties of vervet alarm calls bear little resemblance to human words, the existing acoustic variation, possibly together with additional contextual information, allows listeners to select appropriate responses.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.