Wild chimpanzees' use of single and combined vocal and gestural signals
Abstract
We describe the individual and combined use of vocalizations and gestures in wild chimpanzees. The rate of gesturing peaked in infancy and, with the exception of the alpha male, decreased again in older age groups, while vocal signals showed the opposite pattern. Although gesture-vocal combinations were relatively rare they were consistently found in all age groups, especially during affiliative and agonistic interactions. Within behavioural contexts rank (excluding alpha-rank) had no effect on the rate of male chimpanzees’ use of vocal or gestural signals and only a small effect on their use of combination signals. The alpha male was an outlier, however, both as a prolific user of gestures and recipient of high levels of vocal and gesture-vocal signals. Persistence in signal use varied with signal type: chimpanzees persisted in use of gestures and gesture vocal combinations after failure, but where their vocal signals failed they tended to add gestural signals to produce gesture-vocal combinations. Overall, chimpanzees employed signals with a sensitivity to the public/private nature of information, by adjusting their use of signal types according to social context and by taking into account potential out of-sight audiences. We discuss these findings in relation to the various socio-ecological challenges that chimpanzees are exposed to in their natural forest habitats and the current discussion of multimodal communication in great apes.
Citation
Hobaiter , C L , Byrne , R W & Zuberbuhler , K 2017 , ' Wild chimpanzees' use of single and combined vocal and gestural signals ' , Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology , vol. 71 , 96 . https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-017-2325-1
Publication
Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0340-5443Type
Journal article
Rights
© The Author(s) 2017. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
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