ReviewProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2018
Flexible usage and social function in primate vocalizations.
Review in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 49 papers.
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Who cites it
49 citing papers in PubMed.
- Utterance evolution: the road to generative, combinatorial communicators.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2026Review
- Relationship Value, Emotion, and Uncertainty Shape Conflict-Resolution Communication in a Wild Primate.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2026Article
- Recent social experience alters song behavior in Drosophila.Current biology : CB · 2026Article
- Affiliation as a Social Tension Buffer in the Aftermath of Street Fights.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2026Article
- Food culture as a mechanism of social bonding and social identity in primates.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2026Article
- Video-Sound Recording Devices Reveal Multiple Drivers of Nocturnal Vocalizations in Tibetan Macaques.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Assessing flexibility in meaning and context in non-human communication.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2025Review
- Learned use of an innate sound-meaning association in birds.Nature ecology & evolution · 2025Article
- The Ontogeny of "Twitter" Calls in White-Faced Capuchins (Cebus imitator): Usage, Context, and Acoustic Structure.American journal of primatology · 2025Article
- The role of musical pitch in long-distance defensive signaling.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2025Review
- The gestural repertoire of Bwindi mountain gorillas (Gorilla beringei beringei): gesture form and frequency of use.Animal cognition · 2025Article
- Reactions to social videos in long-tailed macaques.Animal cognition · 2025Article
- Evolutionary Convergence of the Arcuate Fasciculus in Marmosets and Humans.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Combinatorics and complexity of chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) facial signals.Animal cognition · 2025Article
- Investigating the role of the left inferior frontal gyrus in language evolution: insights from comparative neuroscience.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2025Review
- Social negotiation and "accents" in Western lowland gorillas' gestural communication.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- callsync: An R package for alignment and analysis of multi-microphone animal recordings.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Mapping of facial and vocal processing in common marmosets with ultra-high field fMRI.Communications biology · 2024Article
- Wild and captive immature orangutans differ in their non-vocal communication with others, but not with their mothers.Behavioral ecology and sociobiology · 2024Article
- Bioacoustic characterization of the black-and-white ruffed lemur (Varecia variegata) vocal repertoire.Primates; journal of primatology · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Vocalizations are a pervasive feature of nonhuman primate social life, yet we know surprisingly little about their function. We review studies supporting the hypothesis that many primate vocalizations function to facilitate social interactions by reducing uncertainty about the signaler's intentions and likely behavior. Such interactions help to establish and maintain the social bonds that increase reproductive success. Compared with humans, songbirds, and a few other mammals, primates have small vocal repertoires that show little acoustic modification during development. However, their ability to modify call usage is extensive and tuned to variation in the social context, including the historical relationship between caller and listener and the caller's assessment of how a listener is likely to respond. We suggest parallels between the decision to vocalize and neurophysiological studies of other, nonvocal social decisions between interacting monkeys. The selective factors driving the early stages of language evolution may have come from the need to make decisions about when and how to call within the context of social challenges.
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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.