Social negotiation and "accents" in Western lowland gorillas' gestural communication.

ABSTRACT: Recent findings on chimpanzee infants' gestural development show that they use some gesture types flexibly and adjust them depending on their interaction partner and social context, suggesting that gestural communication is partly learnt and partly genetically determined. However, how gesture types are shaped by social and demographic factors remains unclear. We addressed this question by focusing on gesture type morphology and conducted a fined-grained analysis of gestural form during intraspecific social-play interactions in two captive groups of Western lowland gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla). We focused on the most frequent gesture types (BEAT CHEST, SLAP BODY, SLAP GROUND and TOUCH BODY) produced by subadults (infants, juveniles and adolescents). We considered twelve morphological

SUBMITTER: Prieur J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11514168 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature