ArticleiScience2023
Chimpanzees show the capacity to communicate about concomitant daily life events.
Article in iScience, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
What it found
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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
12 citing papers in PubMed, 19 citations in OpenAlex.
- Utterance evolution: the road to generative, combinatorial communicators.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2026Review
- Call combination order and iterations may shift meaning in sooty mangabey vocal sequences.BMC biology · 2026Article
- Challenges and new opportunities in deciphering the meaning of corvid call sequences.Animal cognition · 2025Review
- 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
- 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 sequence diversity and length remain stable across ontogeny in a catarrhine monkey (Cercocebus atys).Communications biology · 2025Article
- Article
- Investigating the role of the left inferior frontal gyrus in language evolution: insights from comparative neuroscience.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2025Review
- Article
- Brain structure and function: a multidisciplinary pipeline to study hominoid brain evolution.Frontiers in integrative neuroscience · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors at 2 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
One universal feature of human language is its versatility in communicating about juxtapositions of everyday events. Versatile combinatorial systems of communication can be selected for if (a) several vocal units are flexibly combined into numerous and long vocal sequences and (b) vocal sequences relate to numerous daily life events. We propose (b) is more likely during simultaneous or serial (concomitant) events than single events. We analyzed 9,391 vocal utterances across the repertoire of wild chimpanzees and their events of production. Chimpanzees used vocal sequences across a range of daily life events and twice as often during concomitant than single events. Also, utterance diversity correlated positively with event diversity. Our results show the potential of chimpanzee vocal sequences to convey combined information about numerous daily life events, a step from which generalized combinatoriality could have evolved.
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Registered trials
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.