Abstract
Human language is a fundamentally cooperative enterprise, embodying fast-paced and extended social interactions. It has been suggested that it evolved as part of a larger adaptation of humans’ species-unique forms of cooperation. Although our closest living relatives, bonobos and chimpanzees, show general cooperative abilities, their communicative interactions seem to lack the cooperative nature of human conversation. Here, we revisited this claim by conducting the first systematic comparison of communicative interactions in mother-infant dyads living in two different communities of bonobos (LuiKotale, DRC; Wamba, DRC) and chimpanzees (Taï South, Côte d’Ivoire; Kanyawara, Uganda) in the wild. Focusing on the communicative function of joint-travel-initiation, we applied parameters of conversation analysis to gestural exchanges between mothers and infants. Results showed that communicative exchanges in both species resemble cooperative turn-taking sequences in human conversation. While bonobos consistently addressed the recipient via gaze before signal initiation and used so-called overlapping responses, chimpanzees engaged in more extended negotiations, involving frequent response waiting and gestural sequences. Our results thus strengthen the hypothesis that interactional intelligence paved the way to the cooperative endeavour of human language and suggest that social matrices highly impact upon communication styles.
Highlights
IntroductionComparative research with a conversation analysis framework (termed ‘CA-assisted comparative research’14), Rossano[15] recently showed that the underlying structure of bonobo gesturing might be more similar to human conversation, and language, than previously thought
Comparative research with a conversation analysis framework, Rossano[15] recently showed that the underlying structure of bonobo gesturing might be more similar to human conversation, and language, than previously thought
In Rossano’s study, gestural sequences of two mother-infant dyads of bonobos living in captivity were investigated, with a special focus on participation frameworks, cooperative adjacency pair-like sequences, and temporal relationships underlying gestural performance[15]
Summary
Comparative research with a conversation analysis framework (termed ‘CA-assisted comparative research’14), Rossano[15] recently showed that the underlying structure of bonobo gesturing might be more similar to human conversation, and language, than previously thought. Pollick and de Waal[10] found that bonobos in captivity are culturally more diverse in their gesture use and display a higher responsiveness to combinatorial signalling than chimpanzees, giving rise to the speculation that bonobos are a better model for understanding the prerequisites of human communication Support for this bonobo-chimpanzee dichotomy stems from other research avenues showing that bonobos are more tolerant and cooperative[11] and outperform chimpanzees in ‘theory of mind’ tasks that require attention to social causality[22]. Shared intentionality has been suggested as the driving force and “the small psychological difference” in human cognitive evolution that paved the way for the cooperative endeavor of language[26,27]
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