Functional referentiality and its implication for the identification of sound-meaning pairings in non-human primate vocal behavior

• Grant number: 22/14407-4
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: November 01, 2022
• End date: October 31, 2023
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics - Linguistic Theory and Analysis
• Principal Investigator: Shigeru Miyagawa
• Grantee: Fernando Valls Yoshida
• Host Institution: Instituto de Biociências (IB). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant: 18/18900-1 - Innovations in human and non-human animal communities, AP.SPEC

Abstract

Due to the inferential character of the interpretations attributed to non-human primate vocal behavior, there is a series of controversies involving the content manifested by each vocalization. Marler (1980) was one of the first scholars to reopen the debate on the motivations behind non-human primate vocal production, and on the quality of the information conveyed to conspecifics. The main obstacle lies in determining whether alarm calls - and, in a broad sense, alert calls - are the expression of the emotional states of the signaler, as Darwin (1872) suggested, or whether they are associated with a symbolic component, expressing specific classes of referents in the external world, as proposed by the Integration Hypothesis - i.e., the Lexical system (Miyagawa et al., 2013). With the aim of assessing these two different assumptions, the project aims to review the concept of functional referentiality put forth by Macedonia & Evans (1993), which is largely employed as the main diagnostics to identify sound and meaning pairings in animal vocal behavior. The two main criteria to determine functionally referential calls will be evaluated: (i) the production criterion, i.e., the production of the calls is context-specific (linked to a particular predator type); and (ii) the perception criterion, i.e., appropriate responses of the calls are stimulus-independent (deployed even when the contextual cue is absent). Furthermore, considering the second assumption - i.e., that calls are symbolic -, the project will seek to identify the elementary referential properties ascribed to human language words in order to assess the extent to which the criteria can assist on the identification of evolutionary precursors to human language words.