Chimpanzee gestural exchanges share temporal structure with human language.

Humans regularly engage in efficient communicative conversations, which serve to socially align individuals. In conversations, we take fast-paced turns using a human-universal structure of deploying and receiving signals which shows consistent timing across cultures. We report here that chimpanzees also engage in rapid signal-to-signal turn-taking during face-to-face gestural exchanges with a similar average latency between turns to that of human conversation.

Many morphs: Parsing gesture signals from the noise.

Parsing signals from noise is a general problem for signallers and recipients, and for researchers studying communicative systems. Substantial efforts have been invested in comparing how other species encode information and meaning, and how signalling is structured. However, research depends on identifying and discriminating signals that represent meaningful units of analysis.

GesturalOrigins: A bottom-up framework for establishing systematic gesture data across ape species.

Current methodologies present significant hurdles to understanding patterns in the gestural communication of individuals, populations, and species. To address this issue, we present a bottom-up data collection framework for the study of gesture: GesturalOrigins. By "bottom-up", we mean that we minimise a priori structural choices, allowing researchers to define larger concepts (such as 'gesture types', 'response latencies', or 'gesture sequences') flexibly once coding is complete.

Dialects in leaf-clipping and other leaf-modifying gestures between neighbouring communities of East African chimpanzees.

Dialects are a cultural property of animal communication previously described in the signals of several animal species. While dialects have predominantly been described in vocal signals, chimpanzee leaf-clipping and other 'leaf-modifying' gestures, used across chimpanzee and bonobo communities, have been suggested as a candidate for cultural variation in gestural communication. Here we combine direct observation with archaeological techniques to compare the form and use of leaf-modifying gestures in two neighbouring communities of East African chimpanzees.

Variable expression of linguistic laws in ape gesture: a case study from chimpanzee sexual solicitation.

Two language laws have been identified as consistent patterns shaping animal behaviour, both acting on the organizational level of communicative systems. Zipf's law of brevity describes a negative relationship between behavioural length and frequency. Menzerath's law defines a negative correlation between the number of behaviours in a sequence and average length of the behaviour composing it.

A socio-ecological perspective on the gestural communication of great ape species, individuals, and social units.

Over the last 30 years, most research on non-human primate gestural communication has been produced by psychologists, which has shaped the questions asked and the methods used. These researchers have drawn on concepts from philosophy, linguistics, anthropology, and ethology, but despite these broad influences the field has neglected to situate gestures into the socio-ecological context in which the diverse species, individuals, and social-units exist. In this review, we present current knowledge about great ape gestural communication in terms of repertoires, meanings, and development.

Testing for Behavioral and Physiological Responses of Domestic Horses () Across Different Contexts - Consistency Over Time and Effects of Context.

In a number of species, consistent behavioral differences between individuals have been described in standardized tests, e.g., novel object, open field test.