Synonyms
Definition
Stereotyped vocalization: Evolved, species-typical vocal act with signal character.
Introduction
How did human communication evolve from an animal-like vocal system to spoken language? Research on primate communication in particular has produced a wealth of data, which highlight the various evolutionary continuities and discontinuities between animal and human communication. Research topics include the mechanisms and flexibility of sound production, how different call units are assembled into complex utterances, how meaning is extracted from vocal structures, and how the psychological mechanisms underlying animal call production and comprehension compare to those of humans. The purpose of this chapter is to present the state-of-the-art of these various strands of research and to show how methodological tools of linguistics can help decipher animal communication.
Animal Vocal Behavior
Vocal Control
Mammalian vocalizations are...
References
Ackermann, H., Hage, S. R., & Ziegler, W. (2014). Brain mechanisms of acoustic communication in humans and nonhuman primates: An evolutionary perspective. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 37(6). https://doi.org/10.1017/s0140525x13003099.
Bergman, T. J. (2010). Experimental evidence for limited vocal recognition in a wild primate: Implications for the social complexity hypothesis. Proceedings of Royal Society B: Biological Science, 277(1696), 3045–3053. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2010.0580.
Engesser, S., Ridley, A. R., & Townsend, S. W. (2016). Meaningful call combinations and compositional processing in the southern pied babbler. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1600970113.
Herbinger, I., Papworth, S., Boesch, C., & Zuberbuehler, K. (2009). Vocal, gestural and locomotor responses of wild chimpanzees to familiar and unfamiliar intruders: A playback study. Animal Behaviour, 78(6), 1389–1396. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2009.09.010.
Kershenbaum, A., Blumstein, D. T., Roch, M. A., Akcay, C., Backus, G., Bee, M. A., Bohn, K., Cao, Y., Carter, G., Cäsar, C., Coen, M., DeRuiter, S. L., Doyle, L., Edelman, S., Ferrer-I-Cancho, R., Freeberg, T. M., Garland, E. C., Gustison, M., Harley, H. E., Huetz, C., Hughes, M., Bruno, J. H., Ilany, A., Jin, D. Z., Johnson, M., Ju, C. H., Karnowski, J., Lohr, B., Manser, M. B., McCowan, B., Mercado, E., Narins, P. M., Piel, A., Rice, M., Salmi, R., Sasahara, K., Sayigh, L., Shiu, Y., Taylor, C., Vallejo, E. E., Waller, S., & Zamora-Gutierrez, V. (2016). Acoustic sequences in non-human animals: A tutorial review and prospectus. Biological Reviews, 91(1), 13–52. https://doi.org/10.1111/brv.12160.
King, S. L., & Janik, V. M. (2013). Bottlenose dolphins can use learned vocal labels to address each other. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences United States of America, 110(32), 13216–13221. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1304459110.
Lameira, A. R., Maddieson, I., & Zuberbuhler, K. (2014). Primate feedstock for the evolution of consonants. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 18(2), 60–62. https://doi.org/10.1016/J.Tics.2013.10.013.
Schlenker, P., Chemla, E., Schel, A. M., Fuller, J., Gautier, J. P., Kuhn, J., Veselinovic, D., Arnold, K., Casar, C., Keenan, S., Lemasson, A., Ouattara, K., Ryder, R., & Zuberbuhler, K. (2016). Formal monkey linguistics. Theoretical Linguistics, 42(1-2), 1–90. https://doi.org/10.1515/tl-2016-0001.
Zuberbühler, K. (2015). Linguistic capacity of non-human animals. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 6(3), 313–321. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcs.1338.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Section Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this entry
Cite this entry
Zuberbühler, K., Chemla, E., Schlenker, P. (2021). Stereotyped Vocalizations. In: Shackelford, T.K., Weekes-Shackelford, V.A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19650-3_3330
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19650-3_3330
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-19649-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-19650-3
eBook Packages: Behavioral Science and PsychologyReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Business, Economics and Social Sciences