Social bonding drives vocal exchanges in Bonobos

The origin of human speech is still a hotly debated topic in science. Evidence of socially-guided acoustic flexibility and proto-conversational rules has been found in several monkey species, but is lacking in social and cooperative great apes. Here we investigated spontaneous vocal interactions wit...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Scientific reports 2019-01, Vol.9 (1), p.711-711, Article 711
Main Authors: Levréro, Florence, Touitou, Sonia, Frédet, Julia, Nairaud, Baptiste, Guéry, Jean-Pascal, Lemasson, Alban
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Animal behavior
Animal biology
Cognitive science
Cognitive Sciences
Conspecifics
Human-computer interaction
Life Sciences
Neurons and Cognition
Neuroscience
Phylogeny
Psychology and behavior
Social bonds
Vertebrate Zoology
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:The origin of human speech is still a hotly debated topic in science. Evidence of socially-guided acoustic flexibility and proto-conversational rules has been found in several monkey species, but is lacking in social and cooperative great apes. Here we investigated spontaneous vocal interactions within a peaceful context in captive bonobos to reveal that vocal interactions obey temporally and social rules. Dyadic vocal interactions were characterized by call overlap avoidance and short inter-call intervals. Bonobos preferentially responded to conspecifics with whom they maintained close bonds. We also found that vocal sharing rate (production rate of shared acoustic variants within each given dyad) was mostly explained by the age difference of callers, as other individual characteristics (sex, kinship) and social parameters (affinity in spatial proximity and in vocal interactions) were not. Our results show that great apes spontaneously display primitive conversation rules guided by social bonds. The demonstration that such coordinated vocal interactions are shared between monkeys, apes and humans fills a significant gap in our knowledge of vocal communication within the primate phylogeny and highlights the universal feature of social influence in vocal interactions.
ISSN:2045-2322
2045-2322
DOI:10.1038/s41598-018-36024-9