All Entries Tagged With: "grooming"
Non-Human Primate Communication: A Brief Sketch
Even non-human primates live in complex societies and need to frequently communicate with each other. They communicate with smells, sounds, visual messages, touching, and rely heavily on body language. Typically, they communicate present emotional moods and intentions, focusing on the immediate. Discreteness refers to the ability to differentiate or separate individual spoken words within a sentence -not blending them together. The oral sounds of some apes and monkeys are somewhat discrete at times as well. Though primatologists have observed some communication patterns commonly used by primate species, unlike us, their communication does not involve much displacement. That is, they apparently do not “talk” about things too far removed from recent or immediate experiences. People discuss Alexander the Great and Ben Franklin. There is no evidence that non-human primates do this.
Can other primates learn and use human languages or have the ability to comprehend a symbolic communication system and to use it creatively? Research on these questions has been ongoing since the 1960’s. It is now clear that at least the great apes can learn and use a simplified version of sign language. However, there’s no universal agreement upon the limits of how innovative their use of language is. It seems sparse, with an upwards limit of about 500 words. One of the stars in this research has been a male bonobo named Kanzi. Check these clips out and make up your own mind about how well he uses language.
