Comments on: Boom-boom-krak-oo – Campbell's monkeys combine just six 'words' into rich vocabulary

By: animal vocalisation researcher

animal vocalisation researcher — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 09:00:59 +0000

The same authors recently publised the work on the element combinations (e.g. the “kak” versus “kak”-”oo”)
Outtatara et al 2009 Campbell’s monkeys use affixation to alter call meaning. PLoS ONE. Something about both these papers is missing, although I haven’t really been able to pin point it down. For one it is strange that the results of the papers weren’t combined into 1 paper, because the PNAS paper here certainly takes away some of the issues of the PLOS paper. In general playbacks are missing. Now you can always aske the question if it is really only the calls that lead to the differences obsereved. Yes the make different calls in different situations, but I would like to know if playbacks of the various call combinations would lead to differences in behavioral responses without any other simuli that could explan the response

By: Val Heart

Val Heart — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 16:59:31 +0000

thanks for sharing the conversations you have with animals… it really shows us how they view things…

By: Mike Keesey

Mike Keesey — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 03:29:04 +0000

@A professor of linguistics: Since the concept of “syllable” and “word” is pretty much that same in some languages (isolating languages), that doesn’t seem like that big a problem. It seems to me that the bigger problem would be the lack of a tree-like structure — the fact that you can’t parse these into nested segments.
(Then again, I’m not a professor of linguistics.)

By: A professor of linguistics

A professor of linguistics — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 15:38:45 +0000

The calls are not analogous to human language words, but rather to human language syllables. Syllables can be combined into words, but don’t necessarily themselves have a fixed meaning (though it may appear so in some cases, where a word consists of a single syllable, for example). Syllables also are subject to fixed order constraints, like the calls above. But combining syllables (and calls) doesn’t involve syntax: the meaning of the combinations are *not* compositionally derivable from the meaning of the parts. (Just as the meaning of “timber”, consisting of two syllables, “tim” and “ber”, is not a function of the meaning of the name “Tim” [a homophone] and “ber” [which is a well-formed syllable of English, but not an independent word].)
I’m somewhat hesitant to comment on this without having been able to see the PNAS article itself (my university hasn’t made the issue available yet), but the chart included here looks like it is from the paper itself. The chart gives us no reason to believe that these calls and their combinations involve anything like syntax; rather, they seem to involve phonology. I only wish the authors had consulted with a linguist before trying to draw parallels to human language structures.

By: Blackbird

Blackbird — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 23:33:37 +0000

Great post! Yes, it makes you think how we are able to learn each others languages (with difficulty, despite being equipped to do so), but knowing what the others are talking about helps. We have little idea of what monkeys might ‘talk about’ other than predators. A Spanish listening to two British guys talking about cricket might take an eternity to learn English…

By: Reader

Reader — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 15:40:02 +0000

Could we get more reference info please? A DOI search for 10.1073/pnas.0908118106 does not seem to yield results in the PNAS database. Thanks.

By: HP

HP — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 02:09:36 +0000

Boom-boom-krak-oo, Campbell’s Monkey male,
Linguists love you more than you will know. Woh-woh-woh.