ArticleScience advances2025
Versatile use of chimpanzee call combinations promotes meaning expansion.
Article in Science advances, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed.
- 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
- Call combination order and iterations may shift meaning in sooty mangabey vocal sequences.BMC biology · 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
- Compositionality in human and animal communication.Animal cognition · 2025Review
- Article
- Investigating the role of the left inferior frontal gyrus in language evolution: insights from comparative neuroscience.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2025Review
- Article
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7 authors.
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Abstract
Language is a combinatorial communication system able to generate an infinite number of meanings. Nonhuman animals use several combinatorial mechanisms to expand meanings, but maximum one mechanism is reported per species, suggesting an evolutionary leap to human language. We tested whether chimpanzees use several meaning-expanding mechanisms. We recorded 4323 utterances in 53 wild chimpanzees and compared the events in which chimpanzees emitted two-call vocal combinations (bigrams) with those eliciting the component calls. Examining 16 bigrams, we found four combinatorial mechanisms whereby bigram meanings were or were not derived from the meaning of their parts-compositional or noncompositional combinations, respectively. Chimpanzees used each mechanism in several bigrams across a wide range of daily events. This combinatorial system allows encoding many more meanings than there are call types. Such a system in nonhuman animals has never been documented and may be transitional between rudimentary systems and open-ended systems like human language.
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