ArticleiScience2023
Vocal functional flexibility in the grunts of young chimpanzees.
Article in iScience, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- The As and Bs of titi monkey linguistics: why emotional communication is not the enemy.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2026Review
- Ontogeny of dialects across chimpanzee vocalisations.PloS one · 2026Article
- Assessing flexibility in meaning and context in non-human communication.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2025Review
- Birds of a song sing together: adaptive choices in the use of shared vocalizations that indicate age.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- From emotional signals to symbols.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
All living things communicate yet only humans can be said to communicate using language. How this came to be the case is a fundamental mystery unsolved by contemporary science. Within a human lifetime, language emerges from a complex developmental process. As such, understanding chimpanzee vocal development is essential to understanding the evolutionary roots of language. In human development, language is directly built upon the early capacity for "vocal functional flexibility"-the ability to flexibly express the same vocalizations in different ways to achieve different functions. Primate vocalizations, by contrast, have long been believed to be relatively inflexible regarding both production and function. In this paper, we break new ground by providing evidence for vocal functional flexibility in one of the first systematic studies of early chimpanzee vocal production and function. This finding implies the developmental foundations for language are rooted in our primate evolutionary heritage.
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