ArticleCommunications biology2022
Chimpanzees produce diverse vocal sequences with ordered and recombinatorial properties.
Article in Communications biology, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 39 papers.
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39 citing papers in PubMed, 84 citations in OpenAlex.
- Utterance evolution: the road to generative, combinatorial communicators.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2026Review
- Evolution of primate vocal repertoires: vocal systems as embodied capital for mediating within-group conflict.Primates; journal of primatology · 2026Article
- Structure without semantics: no evidence for bonobo compositionality in Berthet et al. (2025).PeerJ · 2026Article
- Challenges and new opportunities in deciphering the meaning of corvid call sequences.Animal cognition · 2025Review
- The role of musical pitch in long-distance defensive signaling.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2025Review
- Generative vocal plasticity in chimpanzees.iScience · 2025Article
- Long arcuate fascicle in wild and captive chimpanzees as a potential structural precursor of the language network.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Versatile use of chimpanzee call combinations promotes meaning expansion.Science advances · 2025Article
- Structure in conversation: Evidence for the vocabulary, semantics, and syntax of prosody.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- A primate grammar enabling incremental processing.iScience · 2025Article
- Emotions mediate nonlinear phenomena production in the vocalizations of two ape species.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Vocal Learning Versus Speech Evolution: Untangling a False Equivalence.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Vocal sequence diversity and length remain stable across ontogeny in a catarrhine monkey (Cercocebus atys).Communications biology · 2025Article
- Investigating the role of the left inferior frontal gyrus in language evolution: insights from comparative neuroscience.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2025Review
- The role of exploration and exploitation in primate communication.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Article
- A bounded hierarchy framework for the evolution of syntax.Biology & philosophy · 2025Article
- Beyond bigrams: call sequencing in the common marmoset (Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Article
- Nonadjacent dependencies and sequential structure of chimpanzee action during a natural tool-use task.PeerJ · 2024Article
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 2 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The origins of human language remains a major question in evolutionary science. Unique to human language is the capacity to flexibly recombine a limited sound set into words and hierarchical sequences, generating endlessly new sentences. In contrast, sequence production of other animals appears limited, stunting meaning generation potential. However, studies have rarely quantified flexibility and structure of vocal sequence production across the whole repertoire. Here, we used such an approach to examine the structure of vocal sequences in chimpanzees, known to combine calls used singly into longer sequences. Focusing on the structure of vocal sequences, we analysed 4826 recordings of 46 wild adult chimpanzees from Taï National Park. Chimpanzees produced 390 unique vocal sequences. Most vocal units emitted singly were also emitted in two-unit sequences (bigrams), which in turn were embedded into three-unit sequences (trigrams). Bigrams showed positional and transitional regularities within trigrams with certain bigrams predictably occurring in either head or tail positions in trigrams, and predictably co-occurring with specific other units. From a purely structural perspective, the capacity to organize single units into structured sequences offers a versatile system potentially suitable for expansive meaning generation. Further research must show to what extent these structural sequences signal predictable meanings.
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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.