Marlen Fröhlich

University of Tuebingen | EKU Tübingen · Faculty of Science

The presence of divergent and independent research traditions in the gestural and vocal domains of primate communication has resulted in major discrepancies in the definition and operationalization of cognitive concepts. However, in recent years, accumulating evidence from behavioural and neurobiological research has shown that both human and non‐h...

Whether nonhuman species can change their communicative repertoire in response to socio-ecological environments has critical implications for communicative innovativeness prior to the emergence of human language, with its unparalleled productivity. Here, we use a comparative sample of wild and zoo-housed orang-utans of two species (Pongo abelii, P....

Between-individual variation in behavioural expression, such as social responsiveness, has been shown to have important eco-evolutionary consequences. However, most comparative research on non-human primate communication has focused on species- or population-level variation, while among- and within-individual variation has been largely ignored or c...

Communicative repair is a fundamental and universal element of interactive language use. It has been suggested that the persistence and elaboration after communicative breakdown in nonhuman primates constitute two evolutionary building blocks of this capacity, but the conditions favouring it are poorly understood. Because zoo-housed individuals of...

Play is thought to serve different purposes at different times during ontogeny. The nature and frequency of play are expected to change accordingly over the developmental trajectory and with socio-ecological context. Orangutans offer the opportunity to disentangle the ontogenetic trajectories of solitary and social play with their extended immature...

In many group-living species, individuals are required to flexibly modify their communicative behaviour in response to current social challenges. To unravel whether sociality and communication systems co-evolve, research efforts have often targeted the links between social organisation and communicative repertoires. However, it is still unclear whi...

Human joint action is inherently cooperative, manifested in the collaborative efforts of participants to minimize communicative trouble through interactive repair. Although interactive repair requires sophisticated cognitive abilities, it can be dissected into basic building blocks shared with non-human animal species. A review of the primate liter...

The evolution of language was likely facilitated by a special predisposition for social interaction, involving a set of communicative and cognitive skills summarized as the ‘interaction engine'. This assemblage seems to emerge early in development, to be found universally across cultures, and to enable participation in sophisticated joint action th...

Human joint action is inherently cooperative, manifested in the collaborative efforts of participants to minimize communicative trouble through interactive repair. Although interactive repair requires sophisticated cognitive abilities, it can be dissected into basic building blocks shared with nonhuman animal species. A review of the primate litera...

An intentional transfer of information is central to human communication. When comparing nonhuman primate communication systems to language, a critical challenge is to determine whether a signal is used in intentional, goal-oriented ways. As it is not possible to directly observe psychological states in any species, comparative researchers have inf...

From early infancy, human face-to-face communication is multimodal, comprising a plethora of interlinked communicative and sensory modalities. Although there is also growing evidence for this in nonhuman primates, previous research rarely disentangled production from perception of signals. Consequently, the functions of integrating articulators (i....

An intentional transfer of information is central to human communication. When comparing nonhuman primate communication systems to language, a critical challenge is to determine whether a signaller intends for the recipient to derive a particular meaning from the message contained in the signal. As it is not possible to directly observe psychologic...

The creation of novel communicative acts is an essential element of human language. Although some research suggests the presence of this ability in great apes, this claim remains controversial. Here, we use orang-utans (Pongo spp.) to systematically assess the effect of the wild-captive contrast on the repertoire size of communicative acts. We find...

From early infancy, human face-to-face communication is “multimodal”, comprising a plethora of interlinked articulators and sensory modalities. Although there is also growing evidence for this in nonhuman primates, the functions of integrating articulators (i.e. multiplex or multi-articulator acts) and channels (i.e. multimodal or multi-sensory act...

Temporary associations with conspecifics provide critical opportunities for the acquisition and development of socioecological skills, especially in species where these interaction opportunities are not readily available. In fact, social interactions can have far-reaching consequences for the cultural and communicative repertoire on both the specie...

The substantial role of food sharing in human evolution has been widely recognized, and food-soliciting tactics may have been critical in facilitating these transfers. Great apes, our closest living relatives, also use food-soliciting tactics to obtain food from both kin and non-kin. However, the individual and social factors involved in requests f...

While signals in evolutionary biology are usually defined as “acts or traits that have evolved because of their effect on others”, work on gestures and vocalizations in various animal taxa have revealed population‐ or even individual‐specific meanings of social signals. These results strongly suggest that communicative acts that are like signals wi...

The Chimpanzees of the Taï Forest - edited by Christophe Boesch November 2019

The communicative function of primates' self-directed behaviours like scratching has gained increasing attention in recent years, but their intentional use is still debated. Here, we addressed this issue by exploring the communicative function of 'loud scratches' in wild Sumatran orangutans. Building on previous studies in chimpanzees, we examined...

Scientific interest in the acquisition of gestural signalling dates back to the heroic figure of Charles Darwin. More than a hundred years later, we still know relatively little about the underlying evolutionary and developmental pathways involved. Here, we shed new light on this topic by providing the first systematic, quantitative comparison of g...

Great apes deploy gestural signals in goal-directed and flexible ways across a wide range of social contexts. Despite growing evidence for profound effects of developmental experience on social cognition, socio-ecological factors shaping gesture use are still poorly understood, particularly in apes living in their natural environment. After discuss...

Language is commonly narrowed down to speech, but human face-to-face communication is in fact an intrinsically multimodal phenomenon. Despite growing evidence that the communication of non-human primates, our main model for the evolution of language, is also inherently multimodal, most studies on primate communication have focused on either gesture...

In the quest to bridge the gulf between the fields of linguistics and animal communication, interest has recently been drawn to turn-taking behavior in social interaction. Vocal turn-taking is the core form of language usage in humans, and has been examined in numerous species of birds and primates. Recent studies on great apes have shown that they...

To understand the complexity involved in animal signalling, studies have mainly focused on repertoire size and information conveyed in vocalizations of birds and nonhuman primates. However, recent studies on gestural abilities of nonhuman primates have shown that we also need a detailed understanding of other communicative modalities and underlying...

Social play is a frequent behaviour in great apes and involves sophisticated forms of communicative exchange. While it is well established that great apes test and practise the majority of their gestural signals during play interactions, the influence of demographic factors and kin relationships between the interactants on the form and variability...

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...

It is well established that great apes communicate via intentionally produced, elaborate and flexible gestural means. Yet relatively little is known about the most fundamental steps into this communicative endeavour—communicative exchanges of mother–infant dyads and gestural acquisition; perhaps because the majority of studies concerned captive gro...

Human language is manifested by fast-paced and extensive social interactions, thereby representing an essentially cooperative endeavour. It has been repeatedly claimed that the cognitive skills related to participation in cooperative communication are unique to the human species (Levinson, 1995; Tomasello, 2008). One way to enable a better understa...

Comparative studies in relation to language origins have mainly focused on our closest living relatives, bonobos ( Pan paniscus ) and chimpanzees ( Pan troglodytes ). Direct comparisons however are still lacking and/or concerned individuals living in captive environments only. Here, we carried out a systematic, quantitative comparison of communicat...

Comparative studies in relation to language origins have mainly focused on our closest living relatives, bonobos ( Pan paniscus ) and chimpanzees ( Pan troglodytes ). Direct comparisons however are still lacking and/or concerned individuals living in captive environments only. Here, we carried out a systematic, quantitative comparison of communicat...

The Sulawesi endemic species Macaca maura has been listed in the IUCN Red List as Endangered (A2cd) since 1996, mainly due to habitat disturbance and fragmentation. Nowadays, residual populations have increasingly been relegated to the karst areas of the island's Southern District. The main goal of this project is to point out preferences and strat...

Despite their wide distribution, feeding habits of leopards, Panthera pardus, outside savanna and forest habitats are poorly understood.We explored a novel approach of combining both GPS cluster and activity data analysis to study the hunting activity of a single female leopard in the Cederberg Mountains of the Western Cape, South Africa. Positions...