NYU13
Primate Linguistics (and Beyond)
(LINGUAE, Institut Jean-Nicod, CNRS; New York University)
September-October 2013 - NYU
Instructor: Philippe Schlenker
Directeur de Recherche, Institut Jean-Nicod, Paris
Global Distinguished Professor, New York University
E-mail: philippe.schlenker@gmail.com
Topic
In the last 30 years, field experiments in primatology have yielded rich data on the morphology, syntax and semantics of primate alarm calls. To give but one (particularly rich) example: Ouattara et al. 2009a, b suggested that male Campbell's monkey calls (i) involve 4 roots (krak, hok, wak, boom), (ii) one suffix (-oo) which attaches to 3 of the roots (yielding krak-oo, hok-oo, wak-oo), and (iii) possibly one clear syntactic rule (boom appears sentence-initially); we will further suggest on the basis of more recent data that (iv) an explicit semantics can be devised for these calls, and that (v) it can account for apparent cases of dialectal variation among Campbell's monkeys. The goal of the seminar is to review recent results on the communication systems of primates and other species, focusing in particular on domains in which the data might be ripe for explicit models using the general tools of formal linguistics. This methodological goal is largely independent from the issue of the evolutionary connection between human language and these other communication systems – although in the long run detailed analyses of their formal properties should help illuminate the evolutionary question.
The seminar will include guest lectures by specialists of animal communication. Students will be encouraged to focus on one non-human species and review what is known about the formal properties of its communication system.
Please email the instructor if you intend to take/attend this seminar.
Requirements
Besides active class participation:
(i) 1 squib/mini-literature review + 1 class presentation
(ii) 1 mini-term paper (to be emailed 10 days after the seminar end)
Recommended topic for (i) and (ii): select a non-human species (whether primate or not); review the literature on its communication system; if possible, propose explicit rules to model it, based on the existing literature (and on raw data if some are available; this might involve contacting the owners of the data).
[Note that there is a lot of interesting work to review which does not pertain to call semantics; non-semantics-related papers are definitely welcome!]
Please contact the instructor as early as possible to discuss (i) and (ii).
Schedule
8 weeks in September-October 2013 (see below). General sessions are open to everybody; student sessions are open to all students and postdocs (whether registered or not).
Sessions and Readings (still tentative; to be adapted as we go)
Note: the readings and slides will be made available by way of a shared Dropbox folder. Please email the instructor to obtain the link.
Week 1
Week 2
Week 3
Week 4
Week 5
Week 6
Week 7
Week 8
General Sessions Mondays 3.30 PM - 6.15 PM at 10WP 103except 1st session: Tuesday, Sept. 3rd, 3:30PM-6:15PM, room to be announced.2 hours 45 minutes; everybody is welcome
Tuesday, Sept. 3rd, 3:30-6:15PM - 10WP 104 Introduction
Student Sessions 1 hour 45 minutes; all students and postdocs are welcome - whether registered or not
Exceptional time: Wednesday 10-11:45am Discussion: Finite-State Machines and English Handout
Berwick et al. 2011
Zuberbühler 2009
[Slides are henceforth in the shared Dropbox folder]
Monday, Sept. 9th, 3:30-6:15pm, 10WP 103 [= normal place and time] Guest Lecture: Ofer Tchernichovski (CUNY) 'Vocal Learning: an investigation across songbirds and human infants'
Tuesday, September 10th, 10-12, 10 WP 205.
[If you haven't already done soo, please complete the Doodle poll.]
Discussion + mini-appointments with the instructor to discuss possible squib and paper topics.
Tuesday, September 17th, 9-11, 10 WP 205
Discussion of monkey calls + Presentation on birds by Dylan Bumford
Lipkind D, Marcus GF, Bemis DK, Sasahara K, Jacoby N, Takahasi M, Suzuki K, Feher O, Ravbar P, Okanoya K, Tchernichovski O. (2013) Stepwise acquisition of vocal combinatorial capacity in songbirds and human infants. Nature. doi: 10.1038/nature12173
+ Shared protocol for babbling analysis
Ravbar, P., Lipkind, D., Parra, L. C., & Tchernichovski, O. (2012). Vocal Exploration Is Locally Regulated during Song Learning. The Journal of Neuroscience, 7 March 2012, 32(10):3422-3432
Lipkind, D., Tchernichovski, O (2011) Quantification of developmental birdsong learning from the subsyllabic scale to cultural evolution. PNAS. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1012941108
Monkey calls I: Campbell's monkeys Monday, September 16th, 3:30pm-6:15pm
Monkey calls II: Putty-nosed and Blue monkeys Monday, September 23rd, 3:30-6:15pm
Tuesday, September 24, 9-11, 10 WP 205
Student session. Dunja Veselinovic on Diana monkeys
Examples of Putty-nosed calls (Nature)
Squib due
1. Provide a brief (1 paragraph) definition of the topic of your mini-term paper.
2. Briefly review at least one article or data set that will pertain to your mini-term paper. Make sure (i) to lay out the main empirical generalizations discussed in the paper; and (ii) to explain what they tell us about the formal properties of the communication system under discussion.
Monkey calls III: Colobus monkeys and Titi monkeys Colobus monkeys: Schel et al. 2009 Titi monkeys: Cäsar et al. 2013
[student session moved to Week 8]
Tuesday, October 8, 9:30-11, 10 WP 205
Black-and-White Colobus monkeys at the St Louis zoo
Black-and-White Colobus monkeys (Guereza) in the wild
Example of a Black-and-White Colobus monkey male roar
Example of a Colobus monkey (Guereza) morning chorus
Black-and-White Colobus monkeys (Polykomos) in the wild
Tool use in a captive Capuchin monkey
General presentation of long-range calls in other Titi monkeys
Ape communication Vocal communication in Chimpanzees: Slocombe and Zuberbühler 2010 Gestural communication in Chimpanzees: Hobaiter and Byrne 2011 'Signing' Chimpanzees: Rivas 2005 [for a very brief summary of work on signing apes, see the end of Jensvold 2009]
Student session. Jeremy Kuhn on Campbell calls
Reading: Keenan et al. 2013 'Graded or Discrete?'
Gibbon interacting with tigers
Bonobo food calls [go to Audio S1 - Audio S2]
'Signing' Apes
Bonobos using lexigrams
'Kanzi, an Ape of Genius' (NHK)
[NYU holiday] Tuesday, October 15th, 1pm: Optional session on 'Teaching 'sign language' to apes', based on documentaries.
[NYU holiday]
Exceptional schedule: student session on Tuesday and guest lecture on Wednesday Tuesday, October 22 - 9-11, 10 WP 205: Student session Albarel on Campbell's monkeys; Bumford on birds Wednesday, October 23 - 10:30am-12:30pm 10 WP 104 Guest Lecture: Alban Lemasson on primate communication (and beyond) Mammalian vocal communication as a social act: from message coding to primates’ precursors of language (Part II)
Mini-term paper due (by email) on Tuesday, November 5th, 2013 Note: your mini-term paper can be brief, but it should be turned in on time [no incompletes!]
Squib due [by email]
1. Briefly review at least one article or data set that will pertain to your mini-term paper. Make sure to (i) lay out the main empirical generalizations discussed in the paper, and by which methods they were obtained; (ii) explain what they tell us about the formal properties of the communication system under discussion.
2. Provide an outline of your mini-term paper.
Monday, October 21, 3:30pm-6:15pm - 10 WP 103 Guest Lecture: Alban Lemasson on primate communication (and beyond)Mammalian vocal communication as a social act: from message coding to primates’ precursors of language (Part I)
Plan of the 2-part lecture:
- Introduction to Ethology, Animal communication and message coding
- Message coding in mammals: a diversity of « honest » signals
* Emotion-related signals
* Identity-related signals (morphology, physiology, social status, individual identity)
* Functional reference in signals (alarm and copulation calls)
- A social-vocal coevolution (example from different mammal groups)
- Acoustic plasticity: a “phylogenetic” gap
* Plasticity in non-primate species (cetaceans, bats, elephants, goats)
* Copying human voices
* Nonhuman primate vocal limitations (morpho-anatomical constraints)
* Primate vocal ontogeny: a dichotomy? (genetic determinism)
- Tracking precursors of human language in nonhuman primates
* Debated theories about language origins
*Voluntary control (neurobiology, behavior)
* Auditory perception: hemispheric specialization
* Revisiting the nonhuman primate fixity (vocal learning in juveniles and adults)
* Exceptional plasticity (call innovation, male-female copying)
* Proto-conversation (temporal rules, turn-taking, vocal accommodation)
* Signal directionality (audience effect, intentionality)
* Proto-syntax (affixation, semantic sound combination)
- Conclusion
Note: Robert Seyfarth (UPenn) is scheduled to give a Colloquium talk at the Anthropology Department on November 14, 2013. More information here.
Links
Klaus Zuberbühler's summary of Primate Communication
James Higham's NYU class on 'Primate Communication'
Tutorial on the dance language of bees
Initial References
(Some relevant articles will be made available by way of a shared Dropbox folder.)
Arnold, Kate, Lemasson, Alban, and Zuberbühler, Klaus: 2013, Population differences in combinatorial calling of wild Campbell's monkeys. Manuscript, University of St Andrews.
Arnold, Kate, Pohlner, Y., & Zuberbühler, Klaus: 2008, A forest monkeys alarm calls to predator models. Behavioral. Ecology and Sociobiology, 62, 549–559.
Arnold, Kate and Zuberbühler, Klaus: 2012, Call combinations in monkeys: Compositional or idiomatic expressions?, Brain and Language, 120, 3: 303-309, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.bandl.2011.10.001.
Arnold , K & Zuberbühler , K: 2013, Female putty-nosed monkeys use experimentally altered contextual information to disambiguate the cause of male alarm calls. PLoS One , vol 8 , no. 6 , e65660 .
Berwick RC, Okanoya K, Beckers GJ, Bolhuis JJ.: 2011, Songs to Syntax: the Linguistics of Birdsongs. Trends in Cognitive Science 15(3):113-21
Cäsar, Cristiane, Byrne, Richard, Young, Robert J. and Zuberbühler, Klaus: 2012, The alarm call system of wild black-fronted titi monkeys, Callicebus nigrifrons Behav Ecol Sociobiol, 66:653–667
Cheney, Dorothy and Seyfarth, Robert: 1990, How Monkeys See The World: Inside The Mind Of Another Species. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Chierchia, Gennaro, Danny Fox, and Benjamin Spector. To appear. The Grammatical View of Scalar Implicatures and the Relationship between Semantics and Pragmatics. In Semantics: An International Handbook of Natural Language Meaning, ed. Paul Portner, Claudia Maienborn, and Klaus von Heusinger. Berlin, NewYork: Mouton de Gruyter.
Dyer, Fred D.: 2002, The Biology of the Dance Language. Annu. Rev. Entomol. 2002. 47:917–49
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Hobaiter, Catherine and Byrne, Richard: 2011, The Gestural Repertoire of the Wild Chimpanzee, Anim Cogn DOI 10.1007/s10071-011-0409-2
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Lemasson, A., Glas, L., Barbu, S., Lacroix, A., Guilloux, M., Remeuf, K., Koda, H.: 2011a, Youngsters do not pay attention to conversational rules: also in nonhuman primates? Nature Scientific reports 1, 22.
Lemasson, A., & Hausberger, M.: 2011, Acoustic variability and social significance of calls in female Campbell’s monkeys (Cercopithecus campbelli campbelli). Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 129(5), 3341-3352.
Lemasson, A., Ouattara, K., Bouchet, H., Zuberbühler, K.: 2010, Speed of call delivery is related to context and caller identity in Campbell’s monkey males. Naturwissenschaften, 97, 11, 1023-1027.
Lemasson, A., Ouattara, K., Petit, E., Zuberbühler, K.: 2011b, . Social learning of vocal structure in a nonhuman primate? BMC Evolutionary Biology 11: 362.
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