ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2020
Syntax and compositionality in animal communication.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 26 papers.
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Who cites it
26 citing papers in PubMed.
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- Utterance evolution: the road to generative, combinatorial communicators.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2026Review
- Challenges and new opportunities in deciphering the meaning of corvid call sequences.Animal cognition · 2025Review
- Dogs as a model to study the emergence of concept manipulation skills for language-readiness.Biologia futura · 2025Review
- Modified specific components of conspecific advertisement calls influence behavioral and neural responses in music frogs.Communications biology · 2025Article
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- Seeds of language-like generativity in bird call combinations.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Early-emerging combinatorial thought: Human infants flexibly combine kind and quantity concepts.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Multimodal communication and audience directedness in the greeting behaviour of semi-captive African savannah elephants.Communications biology · 2024Article
- Goal-directed and flexible modulation of syllable sequence within birdsong.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Contiguity in perception: origins in cellular associative computations.Trends in neurosciences · 2024Review
- Article
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- Article
- Optionality in animal communication: a novel framework for examining the evolution of arbitrariness.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2022Article
- Evidence for compositionality in baboons (Papio papio) through the test case of negation.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- My life with primates.Primates; journal of primatology · 2022Review
- Transition to language: From agent perception to event representation.Wiley interdisciplinary reviews. Cognitive science · 2022Article
- Experimental evidence for core-Merge in the vocal communication system of a wild passerine.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Chimpanzees produce diverse vocal sequences with ordered and recombinatorial properties.Communications biology · 2022Article
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Abstract
Syntax has been found in animal communication but only humans appear to have generative, hierarchically structured syntax. How did syntax evolve? I discuss three theories of evolutionary transition from animal to human syntax: computational capacity, structural flexibility and event perception. The computation hypothesis is supported by artificial grammar experiments consistently showing that only humans can learn linear stimulus sequences with an underlying hierarchical structure, a possible by-product of computationally powerful large brains. The structural flexibility hypothesis is supported by evidence of meaning-bearing combinatorial and permutational signal sequences in animals, with sometimes compositional features, but no evidence for generativity or hierarchical structure. Again, animals may be constrained by computational limits in short-term memory but possibly also by limits in articulatory control and social cognition. The event categorization hypothesis, finally, posits that humans are cognitively predisposed to analyse natural events by assigning agency and assessing how agents impact on patients, a propensity that is reflected by the basic syntactic units in all languages. Whether animals perceive natural events in the same way is largely unknown, although event perception may provide the cognitive grounding for syntax evolution. This article is part of the theme issue 'What can animal communication teach us about human language?'
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