Girard-Buttoz Cédric, Neumann Christof, Bortolato Tatiana, Zaccarella Emiliano, Friederici Angela D, Wittig Roman M, Crockford Catherine
ENES Bioacoustics Research Laboratory, Centre de Recherche en Neurosciences de Lyon, CNRS, Inserm, University of Saint-Etienne, Saint-Etienne, France.
Institut des Sciences Cognitives Marc Jeannerod, CNRS, 67 Boulevard Pinel, 69675 BRON, Lyon, France.
Sci Adv. 2025 May 9;11(19):eadq2879. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.adq2879.
Language is a combinatorial communication system able to generate an infinite number of meanings. Nonhuman animals use several combinatorial mechanisms to expand meanings, but maximum one mechanism is reported per species, suggesting an evolutionary leap to human language. We tested whether chimpanzees use several meaning-expanding mechanisms. We recorded 4323 utterances in 53 wild chimpanzees and compared the events in which chimpanzees emitted two-call vocal combinations (bigrams) with those eliciting the component calls. Examining 16 bigrams, we found four combinatorial mechanisms whereby bigram meanings were or were not derived from the meaning of their parts-compositional or noncompositional combinations, respectively. Chimpanzees used each mechanism in several bigrams across a wide range of daily events. This combinatorial system allows encoding many more meanings than there are call types. Such a system in nonhuman animals has never been documented and may be transitional between rudimentary systems and open-ended systems like human language.
语言是一种组合式交流系统，能够产生无限数量的意义。非人类动物使用多种组合机制来扩展意义，但据报道每个物种最多使用一种机制，这表明向人类语言的进化有一个飞跃。我们测试了黑猩猩是否使用多种意义扩展机制。我们记录了53只野生黑猩猩的4323次发声，并比较了黑猩猩发出双声组合（二元组）的事件与引发单个叫声的事件。通过研究16个二元组，我们发现了四种组合机制，据此二元组的意义分别从其组成部分的意义中衍生出来（组合性组合）或并非如此（非组合性组合）。黑猩猩在广泛的日常事件中的几个二元组中使用了每种机制。这种组合系统允许编码比叫声类型更多的意义。非人类动物中的这种系统从未被记录过，可能处于初级系统和像人类语言那样的开放式系统之间的过渡阶段。
