Elsevier

Animal Behaviour

Volume 124, February 2017, Pages 339-346
Animal Behaviour

Special Issue: Mechanisms & Function
The origin of meaning in animal signals

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2016.05.020Get rights and content

Highlights

  • We review the meaning of communicative signals in monkeys and apes.

  • Signals are adaptive because they convey information, thereby reducing uncertainty.

  • Meaning emerges from the integration of the signal and the social context.

  • Social species' communication involves a rich system of pragmatic inference.

  • Particularly in species that show individual recognition and interact repeatedly.

Over 40 years ago, Peter Marler proposed that animal signals were adaptive because they provided listeners with information (Marler, 1961, Journal of Theoretical Biology, 1, 295–317). But what was the nature of this information? How did it influence behaviour? And how might the information in animal signals compare with the information in human language? Here we review evidence that signals in a variety of social contexts are adaptive because they convey information. For recipients, meaning results from the integration of information from the signal and the social context. As a result, communication in animals – particularly in long-lived, social species where the same individuals interact repeatedly – constitutes a rich system of pragmatic inference in which the meaning of a communicative event depends on perception, memory and social knowledge. In the human lineage, pragmatics served as a precursor to the later evolution of semantics and syntax. Among primates, there is a striking difference in flexibility between constrained call production and more flexible perception and cognition. However, call production is more flexible in the wild, where it is affected by contextual cues, than in laboratory studies where contextual cues have been removed. Monkeys and apes may overcome the limits of constrained vocal production by producing composite signals in the same and different modalities.

Section snippets

The evolution of social signals

Animals are often involved in overtly competitive interactions: over food, territory, or mates. But rather than immediately escalating to physical fighting, competition is more likely to take the form of displays, like the roars of red deer, Cervus elaphus (Clutton-Brock & Albon, 1979), the jousting of stalk-eyed flies (Wilkinson & Reillo, 1994), the croaking of male frogs (Ryan, 1985), or the loud wahoo calls of male baboons (Fischer et al., 2004, Kitchen et al., 2003). Thanks to decades of

Information

Evolutionary models of communication invoke the concept of information, but their exclusive focus on function leaves them agnostic about the content of information or how it is acquired. Grafen (1990, page 521), for example, stated that ‘at ESS the receivers will have adjusted their assessment rule so that they determine correctly the true quality of a male’, but he did not specify the content underlying the assessment rule or how its adjustment is achieved. For Grafen, all that mattered was

Constrained vocal production

In human language, meaning is a two-way street: signaller and recipient are equally flexible in production and perception, and they typically exhibit ‘semantic parity’, sharing a common representational framework that underlies each person's comprehension of what the other means (Fitch, 2010).

By contrast, when Marler began his research on nonhuman primate vocalizations in the 1960s, the prevailing view held that call production in monkeys and apes was little more than an involuntary reflex –

Summary

Peter Marler led the way in posing thoughtful, challenging questions about the meaning of animal signals, the nature of the information they convey and their function in nature. He inspired and conducted experiments to test hypotheses about communication, the mind, and the differences between animal communication and language. Although he shyed away from general theories, we are, thanks to Peter and many others, now much closer to a broad view of how communication works in different species (

Acknowledgments

Our greatest acknowledgment is to Peter himself, who served as a mentor, intellectual inspiration and friend during so much of our scientific work. The research on vervet monkeys and baboons described here was supported by the National Science Foundation (IBN95-14001), the National Institutes of Health (MN 62249), the National Geographic Society, the Leakey Foundation, Rockefeller University and the University of Pennsylvania. We thank Bill Searcy and two referees for comments on an earlier

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