13 Mar
2026
13 Mar
'26
5:15 p.m.
Dear All,
The CEU Department of Cognitive Science invites you to the following talk:
Catherine Crockford (CNRS
Lyon)<https://www.eva.mpg.de/ecology/staff/catherine-crockford/>
Chimpanzees show protracted vocal utterance development with implications for language
evolution theories.
Theories of language evolution depend in part upon accurate empirical and comparative
assessment of animal communicative capacities. One problem, demonstrated by recent
discoveries, is that we still do not know how complex animal communication is. Ontogenetic
analyses are helping to change this. Only one natural communication system is considered
combinatorially complex with respect to mapping complex structure to complex meaning. This
is human language. With a limited sound set, we combine words into utterances, generating
endless new and relational meanings. Most animals have a limited sound set that is largely
fixed from birth, and per species produce few multi-signal utterances in which the meaning
shifts compared to the composing signals. However, recent studies delving into vocal
sequence production suggest a dramatically different pattern in chimpanzee vocal
production. Chimpanzees demonstrate highly flexible abilities to combine calls with
ordering and recombinatorial properties. Vocal combinations which show compositional-like
structures, such that calls combined into utterances may disambiguate, add or generate new
meanings compared to the composing calls. Like humans but unlike African monkeys,
ontogenetic development is protracted, with utterance length and diversity dramatically
increasing until 10 years of age. Such a developmental trajectory, in combination with
population differences documented in sequence structure, are both suggestive of social
learning capacities. Social learning is also indicated by population and community
differences in the form and usage of some gestural signals. Taken together, our results
place chimpanzee combinatorial capacities between those of humans and African monkeys,
with implications for brain evolution, including changes to reorganization of human
language tract homologues and for evolution of language theories.
Date: Wednesday, March 18, 2026
Time: 4 pm (to 5:30 pm) CET
Venue: D001-Tiered* (QS Vienna) and Zoom (meeting ID: 969 2496
5784<https://ceu-edu.zoom.us/j/96924965784?pwd=c2duZ0dDMFdEMUthK2Mwa2wzMllEUT09>,
passcode: 471712)
Chair: Prof. Gergely Csibra
*Anyone not affiliated with CEU wishing to attend in-person in Vienna must RSVP
here<https://forms.cloud.microsoft/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=E1nE2VN24kuSC72wOGOBhAH3qG-CM_1AneZBqb5K0GdUMkw4T0FMTjdVS1NGWDBENVBIVFdTR1RPTi4u>
to get access to the lecture hall.
Looking forward to seeing you then!
All the best,
Anna Banki
[Image]
Anna Bánki
Postdoctoral Researcher
Department of Cognitive Science, Causal Cognition Lab
bankia@ceu.edu<mailto:bankia@ceu.edu> | +43 1 25230 7584<tel:+431252307584> |
My Research<https://research.ceu.edu/en/persons/anna-banki/>
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