Abstract
In this bottom-up study of gesture, we focused on the details of a single gesture, Touch. We compared characteristics of use by three young chimpanzees with those of 11 adults, their interactive partners, housed in a semi-natural social group at the Kyoto University Primate Research Institute (KUPRI) in Japan. Five hundred eighty-one observations of the gesture Touch were collected across a four-year time span. This single gesture had 36 different forms, was directed to 70 different target locations on the body of social partners, and occurred in 26 different contexts. Significant differences were found between infant and adult initiators in the form, target locations, and contexts of the gesture Touch. There was a wide diversity in form–location patterns within each context, and there were no form–location patterns specific to particular contexts. Thus, we demonstrate that this gesture exhibits flexibility in form and flexibility in use. The results from this study illustrate the importance of contextualized meaning in understanding flexibility in the gesture use of great apes.
Highlights
Primates have long been used as models for trying to understand the developmental processes that underlie human communication, given humans close genetic relationship with chimpanzees
Chi-square tests were used to determine if infants and adults differed, if there was an overall relation between form and context, if there was a relation between target location and context, and whether there were form–locations patterns found within contexts or across initiator
We did not find any consistent form–location patterns in any context, or when considering only Touches initiated by adults to infants, or only Touches initiated by infants
Summary
Primates have long been used as models for trying to understand the developmental processes that underlie human communication, given humans close genetic relationship with chimpanzees. Studies of ape gestures have tended to focus on top-down demonstrations of underlying cognitive processes (e.g. intentionality: Bard 1992; Tomasello et al 1985), establish repertoires of intentionally communicative gestures Few have focused on the details of the form of the gesture to illuminate communicative behaviour. We apply a different process of developing a gestural repertoire, one that relies on bottom-up processes, to fully describe a gesture used by chimpanzees, the gesture Touch. We specify the form used, in terms of the signaller’s behaviour, and the possible sensory perceptions of the receiver, in terms of the places on the body that are touched, i.e. the target locations. In line with our ideas that gestures develop (e.g. Bard et al 2014b), we compare the
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