ArticleNature communications2022
Experimental evidence for core-Merge in the vocal communication system of a wild passerine.
Article in Nature communications, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed, 34 citations in OpenAlex.
- Utterance evolution: the road to generative, combinatorial communicators.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2026Review
- The As and Bs of titi monkey linguistics: why emotional communication is not the enemy.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2026Review
- Challenges and new opportunities in deciphering the meaning of corvid call sequences.Animal cognition · 2025Review
- Compositionality in human and animal communication.Animal cognition · 2025Review
- Birds combined calls more than 11 million years ago.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- A bounded hierarchy framework for the evolution of syntax.Biology & philosophy · 2025Article
- Testing semantic compositionality in baboons (Papio papio) through relearning and generalization.PloS one · 2025Article
- Beyond bigrams: call sequencing in the common marmoset (Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Contextual and combinatorial structure in sperm whale vocalisations.Nature communications · 2024Article
- No evidence for language syntax in songbird vocalizations.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Sequence representation as an early step in the evolution of language.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- Experimental evidence for core-Merge in the vocal communication system of a wild passerine.Nature communications · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
One of the cognitive capacities underlying language is core-Merge, which allows senders to combine two words into a sequence and receivers to recognize it as a single unit. Recent field studies suggest intriguing parallels in non-human animals, e.g., Japanese tits (Parus minor) combine two meaning-bearing calls into a sequence when prompting antipredator displays in other individuals. However, whether such examples represent core-Merge remains unclear; receivers may perceive a two-call sequence as two individual calls that are arbitrarily produced in close time proximity, not as a single unit. If an animal species has evolved core-Merge, its receivers should treat a two-call sequence produced by a single individual differently from the same two calls produced by two individuals with the same timing. Here, we show that Japanese tit receivers exhibit antipredator displays when perceiving two-call sequences broadcast from a single source, but not from two sources, providing evidence for core-Merge in animals.
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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.