Abstract
Language, humans’ most distinctive trait, still remains a ‘mystery’ for evolutionary theory. It is underpinned by a universal infrastructure—cooperative turn-taking—which has been suggested as an ancient mechanism bridging the existing gap between the articulate human species and their inarticulate primate cousins. However, we know remarkably little about turn-taking systems of non-human animals, and methodological confounds have often prevented meaningful cross-species comparisons. Thus, the extent to which cooperative turn-taking is uniquely human or represents a homologous and/or analogous trait is currently unknown. The present paper draws attention to this promising research avenue by providing an overview of the state of the art of turn-taking in four animal taxa—birds, mammals, insects and anurans. It concludes with a new comparative framework to spur more research into this research domain and to test which elements of the human turn-taking system are shared across species and taxa.
Highlights
Language—the most distinctive human trait—remains a ‘mystery’ [1] or even a ‘problem’ for evolutionary theory [2,3]
Humans’ most distinctive trait, still remains a ‘mystery’ for evolutionary theory. It is underpinned by a universal infrastructure— cooperative turn-taking—which has been suggested as an ancient mechanism bridging the existing gap between the articulate human species and their inarticulate primate cousins
The present paper draws attention to this promising research avenue by providing an overview of the state of the art of turn-taking in four animal taxa—birds, mammals, insects and anurans. It concludes with a new comparative framework to spur more research into this research domain and to test which elements of the human turn-taking system are shared across species and taxa
Summary
Language—the most distinctive human trait—remains a ‘mystery’ [1] or even a ‘problem’ for evolutionary theory [2,3]. This term was traditionally restricted to human spoken conversation but has recently been extended to other modalities and species It denotes the orderly exchange of purely communicative signals or behaviours (e.g. peek-a-boo games in humans) between individuals characterized by principles for the coordination of turn transfer, which result in observable temporal regularities. We conclude that a systematic quantitative comparison of a representative range of turn-taking skills among a single set of human and non-human animal individuals is needed to test the hypotheses of Levinson & Holler [5,12] and Tomasello [13] To instigate such a comparison, we present a new framework enabling systematic, quantitative assessments of turn-taking abilities across species and taxa. We hope that this framework will spur more quantitative comparative work (and potentially falsify our claims), and shed light on the question of whether turn-taking has been the ‘small change’ that made a big difference in human history
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