Title: From collocation to call-ocation: using linguistic methods to quantify animal call combinations

Abstract:

Emerging data in a range of non-human animal species have highlighted a latent ability to combine certain pre-existing calls together into larger structures. Such evidence suggests that the capacity to string meaning-bearing units together, a key feature of language also known as syntax, could be evolutionary more ancient than previously thought. Currently, however, the quantification of call combinations has received less attention. This is problematic because animal calls can co-occur with one another simply through chance alone. One common approach applied in language sciences to identify recurrent word combinations is collocation analysis. Through comparing the co-occurrence of two words with how each word combines with other words within a corpus, collocation analysis can highlight above chance, two-word combinations. In this talk, I will demonstrate how we showed that this approach can also be applied to non-human animal communication systems by implementing it on a vocal dataset of our closest-living relative, the chimpanzee, Pan troglodytes. Specifically, we recorded 37 different two-call combinations but following the application of collocation analyses only 15 of these were found to occur at levels significantly above chance. We argue that collocation analysis therefore represents a promising tool for identifying non-random, communicatively relevant call combinations in animals and, ultimately, helps to further our understanding of the evolutionary progression of our own combinatorial communication system, language.

Organised by: Marta Wesierska

Email for teams link: marta.wesierska@warwick.ac.uk

Forthcoming talks: