What do humans, dolphins, elephants and marmosets have in common? The answer has just been given in the journal ScienceAn Israeli team has announced that, among small South American monkeys, each individual has a vocal “label” used by its peers to address it, a property previously reserved for the other three mammals.
David Omer’s lab at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem recorded conversations between captive individuals, with or without the ability to see each other. Then they had these vocalizations analyzed, particularly small cries called « phee calls »using artificial intelligence methods. They found that it was possible to detect who an individual was addressing using these calls alone, that two related marmosets used the same call to address a third, and that, conversely, a monkey responded more to a fellow monkey using its “name”. The Israeli researchers now intend to study other species of monkeys more precisely using these new methods.
The study did not stop there. It highlighted the social nature of learning this language: the little monkeys learn the basics from their parents. It also observed that individuals converse or, at least, express themselves in turns, a rare skill among animals. The Israeli researchers were not able to “crack” the code used by the monkeys. It is not known, for the moment, what encodes the identity of an interlocutor in the phee calls (duration, height, intensity…). But the article is nevertheless judged “very convincing” by Emmanuel Chemla, linguist, research director at the CNRS (ENS Ulm), specialist in animal language, who did not participate in the study.
Read also (2015) | Article reserved for our subscribers “Krak” or “hok”: deciphering the language of monkeys
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The French researcher nevertheless points out that while all of the results could be perfectly explained by the presence of a name in the vocalizations, other reasons “a little different” could also contribute to the observed results. “For example, if a marmoset is particularly agitated, everyone could address it, trying to calm it down.he explains. If an individual is dominant, everyone will speak to him with respect, etc. This can be detected by the intonation that one will take, but it does not mean that a name has been pronounced.
The Israeli researchers do not use the term “name” in their article. But they believe they have highlighted a “individual sound label”far from the only positioning cry so far attributed to the phee callsThis peculiarity could have appeared in marmosets because of their particular way of life: small communities installed in particularly dense canopies.
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