When: Friday, November 22, 2024, 2:00 PM - 3:00 PMWhere: iQ East Court (Scape): 0.11 and online via Zoom
A short talk from Alexandra Safryghin, postdoctoral fellow in the School of Biological and Behavioural Sciences.
Click here to join via Zoom.
Title: “Linguistic laws and communicative efficiency in ape gestural communication”
Abstract:
In animal communication research, there is a keen interest in assessing and comparing the efficiency of communication systems with human languages. Yet, the gestural communication of our closest relatives, chimpanzees, remains underexplored. In my PhD thesis I addressed this gap by investigating communicative efficiency in gestural communication across three chimpanzee communities. Employing a novel coding scheme and diverse gesture duration metrics, I examined the presence of Zipf's law of brevity and Menzerath's law, commonly expressed principles of communicative efficiency in human language, in chimpanzee gesturing. In addition, I directly assessed the optimality of chimpanzee gestures using a novel linguistic metric from human language comparisons. It resulted that each chimpanzee community exhibits a distinct communicative style closely tied to their socio-ecological context. In this talk, I will address my thesis result and hope to discuss potential explanations of such variation of communicative efficiency.