The Linguistic Complexities of Chimpanzees
Category: mammals Date (published): 05-18-2026 14:39;
(0) Animal communication is studied not only to learn more about the animals themselves, but also to understand how human language originated. This refers, of course, to vocal communication: how it occurs, what neural mechanisms are involved in it, and what exactly is contained in the vocal messages animals exchange. In this regard, chimpanzees receive special attention — after all, from an evolutionary perspective, they are our closest relatives. The vocal signal repertoire of chimpanzees is quite broad, and within it, one can distinguish between simple and complex signals. But what does "complex signals" mean? Various animals, not just chimpanzees, combine sounds together, but it is usually thought that the resulting complexity is purely superficial, that the sounds are combined randomly. It has been shown for birds and primates that new meaning emerges in their sound combinations. However, this new meaning is also formed by simple addition, similar to how in the phrase "black cat" the new meaning arises from the simple combination of "black" and "cat."
How chimpanzees speaks
However, in April 2025, a paper was published in Science reporting that in the "language" of pygmy chimpanzees, or bonobos, meaning construction can occur differently — where the overall meaning of an utterance is not equal to the simple sum of its components.
The researchers described the elementary sounds of bonobos in the context in which the apes produce them. The context included more than three hundred parameters. The sounds of bonobos differed depending on whether they were alone or in company, when they were eating, resting, or simply moving from place to place, and so on. Not only were the circumstances in which a particular vocal signal was uttered significant, but also what happened afterwards: whether the speaker or its audience continued doing what they were doing, whether the bonobos switched to another activity, or simply stopped doing anything at all. As for translation into human language, bonobos do, of course, have sounds that are easy to interpret — for example, a warning about a predator. But overall, the researchers did not set out to compile an ape-human dictionary. What exactly a particular sound means in human terms was unimportant; the main thing was that each sound could be described individually and, using this description, the semantic distances between them could be tracked. The researchers described each elementary sound signal using a multitude of parameters solely to place it on a multidimensional semantic map.
Having described the elementary sounds, they could then move on to their combinations. A complex combination has several features: the meanings of the sounds that comprise it must differ, and the meaning of the combination derives from their individual meanings, yet it should not be fully reducible to them. The researchers used distributional semantics methods, which calculate the degree of semantic proximity between linguistic units based on large datasets. For example, the words "cat" and "animal," and "animal" and "predator" are used in similar contexts, and the semantic distance between them will be relatively small. However, the semantic distance between the concepts "cat" and "outer space" will be relatively large. Here, it must be emphasized again that it is absolutely not necessary to know what exactly the words "cat," "animal," "outer space," etc., denote — the semantic distance can be derived from their co-occurrence. Four sound combinations were found in the vocal signals of bonobos whose meaning, according to the multidimensional semantic map, is formed from the meaning of the individual sounds. Three of the four combinations proved to be clearly complex — their overall meaning was not simply the sum of the meanings of the elementary units, although it did derive from them.
Something similar was done with the vocal signals of common chimpanzees — a paper dedicated to them appeared in May of last year in Science Advances. The results turned out to be similar to those of the bonobo study. Sixteen paired combinations of elementary sounds were discovered in the chimpanzees' utterances. Some combinations simply meant the summed meaning of both sounds. If one sound signified a desire to eat, and the second a desire to rest, then together they meant that the chimpanzee wanted to rest and eat. But there were also more complex cases. For instance, the second sound could clarify the meaning of the first: if the first by itself indicated readiness to eat or to go somewhere, then after the second sound, it became clear that the chimpanzee specifically wanted to eat. Sometimes the meaning of the sound combination changed depending on the order of the two sounds within it. And finally, there were examples where the new meaning did not equal the simple sum of the meanings of the elementary sounds. Overall, common chimpanzees demonstrate greater "linguistic" sophistication than bonobos, although further research may even the score between them. One should not equate the sounds of chimpanzees with human speech. But human language did arise from somewhere, and studies like these may perhaps help us understand how linguistic abilities developed during the evolution of humans and their ancestors.
Source: Science and Life, 2026-1
Category:
mammals
Български
Deutsch
ქართული
English
Polski
Română
Русский
Türkçe
Suomi
Svenska
Українська
