ArticleScientific reports2024
Social negotiation and "accents" in Western lowland gorillas' gestural communication.
Article in Scientific reports, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 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
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- When grooming stalls: Assessing communicative repair, negotiation, and progressivity in chimpanzees.iScience · 2026Article
- Food culture as a mechanism of social bonding and social identity in primates.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2026Article
- How can we use social network analysis to better understand Chimpanzee and Gorilla sociality and communication?Animal cognition · 2025Review
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
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Abstract
Recent findings on chimpanzee infants' gestural development show that they use some gesture types flexibly and adjust them depending on their interaction partner and social context, suggesting that gestural communication is partly learnt and partly genetically determined. However, how gesture types are shaped by social and demographic factors remains unclear. We addressed this question by focusing on gesture type morphology and conducted a fined-grained analysis of gestural form during intraspecific social-play interactions in two captive groups of Western lowland gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla). We focused on the most frequent gesture types (BEAT CHEST, SLAP BODY, SLAP GROUND and TOUCH BODY) produced by subadults (infants, juveniles and adolescents). We considered twelve morphological gesture characteristics (e.g., horizontal and vertical hand trajectories, fingers flexion and spread). Our multifactorial investigation shows that morphological characteristics of distinct gesture types can be shaped by social factors, namely signaller's sociodemographic characteristics (group and kinship), signaller's behavioural characteristics (body posture) and context-related characteristics (recipient's sex, attentional state and position in the signaller's visual field). We nurtured the lively debate concerning gesture origins by revealing the existence of "accents" in non-verbal communication and the highly variable adjustment of gestural form to different conspecifics and interactional characteristics, which supports the revised social negotiation hypothesis.
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