ArticleScientific reports2016
Vocal complexity influences female responses to gelada male calls.
Article in Scientific reports, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed, 35 citations in OpenAlex.
- Social engagement modulates wild monkeys' vocal expressions and the behavioral response to that of others.iScience · 2026Article
- Female song elicits increased vocal display effort in both sexes of Alston's singing mouse.Animal behaviour · 2025Article
- Wild gelada monkeys detect emotional and prosocial cues in vocal exchanges during aggression.PloS one · 2025Article
- Neuroendocrine mechanisms contributing to the coevolution of sociality and communication.Frontiers in neuroendocrinology · 2023Review
- Inter-sexual multimodal communication during mating in wild geladas: the leading role of females.Current zoology · 2022Article
- Does Social Complexity Drive Vocal Complexity? Insights from the Two African Elephant Species.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2021Review
- Mouse vocal emission and acoustic complexity do not scale linearly with the size of a social group.The Journal of experimental biology · 2021Article
- Cochlear shape reveals that the human organ of hearing is sex-typed from birth.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- Taking turns: bridging the gap between human and animal communication.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2018Review
- Flexible usage and social function in primate vocalizations.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2018Review
- Emancipation of the voice: Vocal complexity as a fitness indicator.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2017Review
- Divergent acoustic properties of gelada and baboon vocalizations and their implications for the evolution of human speech.Journal of language evolution · 2017Article
- Sequential information in a great ape utterance.Scientific reports · 2016Article
- Gelada vocal sequences follow Menzerath's linguistic law.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2016Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Extensive research indicates that inter-sexual selection drives the evolution of complex vocal communication in birds, but parallel lines of evidence are almost entirely absent in mammals. This dearth of evidence, particularly among primates, limits our understanding of the link between sociality and vocal complexity. Here, we use a playback experiment to quantify how wild female geladas (Theropithecus gelada) respond to three call types that are 'derived' (i.e., unique to geladas) and made by males during various affiliative contexts. These derived calls appeared to be highly salient and preferable to females: they looked longer towards and spent more time in proximity to playbacks of male vocal sequences containing one of the derived calls than to sequences containing only common and less elaborate 'grunt' calls. Our results provide the first experimental evidence for vocal elaboration as a male-specific strategy to maintain social bonds with females in non-human primates.
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