Conversations in the forest: from vocal to gestural turn-taking in wildcommon marmosets (WGF - Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship)

Summary

This resource is an application for Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Wenner-Gren Foundation.

For centuries, researchers have studied language evolution. Recently, the "Interaction Engine” hypothesis suggested that language arose from our unique social interaction abilities, including face-to-face interaction and cooperative turn-taking. Turn-taking has been suggested to be an ancient mechanism found across the primate order. Although turn-taking studies have been biased towards Neotropical primates, they predominantly focused on vocal turn-taking and single call types. This project aimed to bridge this gap by understanding the role of turn-taking across modalities and tackling similarities and differences to human conversational turn-taking. Thus, it investigates turn-taking in common marmosets, renowned for their vocal turn-taking abilities and that exhibit, similarly to humans, a cooperative breeding system. We addressed the following questions: Which role does turn-taking play in common marmosets’ interactions? Which elements characterizing human conversations can also be found in common marmosets’ turn-taking exchanges? The results showed that marmosets have a signal-signal and signal-action turn-taking system, although it might not be as flexible as humans', and employ multimodal communication. Our findings highlight that turn-taking is not restricted to a single vocalization but also plays a role in other modalities, suggesting that this system may be an ancient mechanism and exploring the idea that turn-taking may be primarily multimodal.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• WGF - Support for Research Projects   •
• Wenner-Gren Foundation

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Wenner-Gren Foundation

Notes

Rights & Attribution: This resource is an application from the Wenner-Gren Foundation and has been approved by the grantee solely for pedagogical purposes. Please do not cite, circulate, or duplicate any part of these documents without the express written consent of the author.

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