Breaking conversational rules matters to captive gorillas: A playback experiment.

ABSTRACT: Across human cultures, conversations are regulated by temporal and social rules. The universality of conversational rules suggests possible biological bases and encourages comparisons with the communicative interactions of nonhuman animals. Unexpectedly, few studies have focused on other great apes despite evidence of proto-conversational rules in monkeys, thus preventing researchers from drawing conclusions on potential evolutionary origins of this behaviour. A previous study showed however that western lowland gorillas engage in soft call interactions that seem temporally- and socially-ruled. Indeed, interactions occurred mainly between individuals close in age who followed a preset response delay, thus preventing call overlap. Here, we experimentally investigated the presence of these r

SUBMITTER: Pougnault L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7181860 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature