Whether talking about a politician, cheering on an athlete, or recounting what friends and family have been up to, names often come up in people’s everyday conversations. Researchers now say that marmosets use similar letters.
Besides humans, only dolphins and elephants were previously known to use words for other members of their species.
But now scientists say they have found evidence of behavior in a non-human animal.
Dr David Omer, co-author of the study from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said: “We think this behavior is important for [marmosets’] social cohesion and therefore essential for their survival.”
“We predict that other non-human primates with a similar monogamous social structure may exhibit similar behaviors.”
The team said the work could have other effects as well.
Omer said: “For a long time pronunciation was thought to be genetically predetermined and adaptive, making it not an evolutionary issue. the language of the people. “However, our findings contradict this idea.”
Writing in the journal Science, Omer and colleagues report how they conducted a series of experiments involving a total of 10 marmosets.
Such animals are monkeys that live in small family groups and are known to use whistle-like sounds called “phee calls” to let other marmosets know where they are.
In each experiment, the team placed marmosets with different relationships in a room and allowed them to interact. Then they separated them using a barrier so that the monkeys could not see each other, and recorded their calls.
The researchers found that these monkeys naturally engage in spontaneous phee call chit-chat, taking turns calling.
However, when they examined these words, they found the marmosets used phee-calls for each monkey on the other side of the barrier, similar to human names.
“We found that marmosets have a behavioral strategy. In the first 20 calls or so, in each study, call variability was high – meaning they were trying to call different hosts,” said Omar. “After the first 20 calls [or so] they met in a voice that spoke to a monkey that received a message on the other side of the visual barrier.”
The team added that monkeys in the same family group often used the same calls when talking to a monkey on the other side of the barrier.
“This is proof of vocabulary,” Omer said. “They learn vocabulary words from their family members.”
The team also conducted experiments in which three monkeys were exposed to recordings of phone calls made by others.
The researchers found that marmosets were more likely to respond to calls directed at them, while they found that auditory monkeys could correctly identify the caller.
“The naming phenomenon we report in marmosets is similar to human naming, but there are a few important differences,” said Omer. “People can create an infinite number of combinations of words to create a name. Marmosets use a stereotypical call – the chick’s call – and organize the fine structure of the sound of that call to create a unique label for each recipient.’
Dr Jacob C Dunn, an expert in primate evolution and ecology at Anglia Ruskin University, who was not involved in the study, said the work provided the first evidence of tolerance to other people’s voices in the primate. no one, he added that teaching again. stimulated marmosets used to learn words.
Dunn said that’s important, noting that the extent to which vocabulary learning can be found in non-human primates has been key to reconstructing language evolution.
“It remains to be seen whether some monkeys can use words for others,” he said. “But this study provides exciting evidence of mechanisms that may have facilitated the transition from non-verbal communication to complex language in our hominin ancestors.”
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