Parents often tell their children not to talk back or interrupt, yet both behaviors can be features of human communication.
Chimpanzees do the same, but these primates communicate primarily through gestures rather than speech. In the largest ever dataset on chimpanzee communication, researchers have shown that chimpanzees use a human-like communication style of rapid, interruptive exchanges. study in Current Biology.
Chimpanzee hand gestures
The study focused on gestures, which included a variety of hand signals. Scientists observed more than 8,500 gestures from 252 chimpanzees in five different locations in Africa.
The researchers measured when and how turn-taking took place, and also recorded other conversation patterns such as interruptions. About 14% of conversations involved two chimpanzees and had at least two-part exchanges, although some conversations had as many as seven parts.
Although there is no gestural dictionary for chimpanzees, researchers who have observed primates in the field for years can identify and distinguish many of their gestures. For example, the classic “reaching gesture” is Gal BadigHe is the lead author of the paper and a graduate student at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.
“Here, one chimpanzee extends his arm toward another,” Budig says, “a gesture often used to request food or to be friendly. Sometimes, a handshake is returned as a response from the other chimp.”
Researchers define the meaning of a gesture by how the recipient responds to it. Some gestures initiate actions, like grooming or moving away, while others seem to be related to conflict management, like signaling to stop something or to walk away.
read more: Chimpanzees: Understanding our closest relatives in the animal kingdom
It’s very similar to human conversation
The scientists studied two types of turn-taking behavior in chimpanzees. They observed gesture-to-gesture turn-taking behavior, in which one chimpanzee makes a gesture and the other chimpanzee responds with a gesture. The second type they observed, gesture-to-gesture turn-taking, is when the first chimpanzee makes a gesture and the other chimpanzee changes his or her behavior.
“Most chimpanzee communication moves from gesture to action, and the gesture-to-gesture exchange is very similar to human speech because it involves an exchange of signals,” Budig says.
An interruption occurs when one chimpanzee initiates a gesture and, before it has finished, the intended audience returns the gesture or changes their behavior. Often, the timing between the start of the first gesture and the interruption is only a fraction of a second.
Other animals, including birds and monkeys, communicate by taking turns, but this study illustrates how such interactions most closely resemble human conversation.
“This is one of the first reports of very rapid turn-taking behavior in close proximity where chimpanzees can see each other,” Budig says. The authors hope that this approach can be applied to other species.
read more: Chimpanzees, like humans, communicate to coordinate cooperative hunting.
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Current BiologyChimpanzee gestural communication shares a temporal structure with human language.
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He is the lead author of the paper and a graduate student at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Gul Badig.
Prior to joining Discover Magazine, Paul Smaglik spent more than 20 years as a science journalist specializing in U.S. life sciences policy and global scientist career issues, beginning his career in newspapers before moving to science magazines. His work has appeared in publications such as Science News, Science, Nature, and Scientific American.
