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Cognitive constraints on vocal combinatoriality in a social bird

Watson, Stuart K; Mine, Joseph G; O’Neill, Louis G; Mueller, Jutta L; Russell, Andrew F; Townsend, Simon W (2023). Cognitive constraints on vocal combinatoriality in a social bird. iScience, 26(7):106977.

Abstract

A critical component of language is the ability to recombine sounds into larger structures. Although animals also reuse sound elements across call combinations to generate meaning, examples are generally limited to pairs of distinct elements, even when repertoires contain sufficient sounds to generate hundreds of combinations. This combinatoriality might be constrained by the perceptual-cognitive demands of disambiguating between complex sound sequences that share elements. We test this hypothesis by probing the capacity of chestnut-crowned babblers to process combinations of two versus three distinct acoustic elements. We found babblers responded quicker and for longer toward playbacks of recombined versus familiar bi-element sequences, but no evidence of differential responses toward playbacks of recombined versus familiar tri-element sequences, suggesting a cognitively prohibitive jump in processing demands. We propose that overcoming constraints in the ability to process increasingly complex combinatorial signals was necessary for the productive combinatoriality that is characteristic of language to emerge.

Additional indexing

Item Type:Journal Article, refereed, original work
Communities & Collections:06 Faculty of Arts > Department of Comparative Language Science
07 Faculty of Science > Institute of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies
07 Faculty of Science > Department of Evolutionary Anthropology
Special Collections > Centers of Competence > Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Language Evolution
Dewey Decimal Classification:490 Other languages
410 Linguistics
890 Other literatures
300 Social sciences, sociology & anthropology
Scopus Subject Areas:Health Sciences > Multidisciplinary
Uncontrolled Keywords:Multidisciplinary
Language:English
Date:1 July 2023
Deposited On:06 Feb 2024 16:12
Last Modified:31 Oct 2024 02:35
Publisher:Cell Press (Elsevier)
ISSN:2589-0042
OA Status:Gold
Free access at:Publisher DOI. An embargo period may apply.
Publisher DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2023.106977
PubMed ID:37332672
Project Information:
  • Funder: University of Exeter
  • Grant ID:
  • Project Title:
  • Funder: Macquarie University
  • Grant ID:
  • Project Title:
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  • Language: English
  • Licence: Creative Commons: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

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