Principal Investigator:
Heidi Lyn
Research Scientist
Wildlife Conservation Society’s
New York Aquarium

Co-Investigator:
Patricia M. Greenfield
Professor of Psychology
University of California, Los Angeles

Co-Investigator:
Sonia Ragir
Professor of Anthropology
College of Staten Island, CUNY

Consultant:
Simone Pika
University of Alberta

DEVELOPMENT OF LANGUAGE, GESTURE AND PLAY IN BONOBOS

OVERVIEW

This project focuses on the development of three cognitive behaviors (play, gesture and discourse) in a group of bonobos (and one chimpanzee). For two language competent bonobos, Panbanisha and Nyota, the development of these three behaviors will be directly compared to each other, to a language development timelines (also to be developed during the grant period) and to the normal course of development of these abilities in human children.

A video encoding software program will be developed for use in the investigations which will promote compatibility between studies, within and across projects. Investigations into play will attempt to capture the emergence of communication and rule-like behavior by watching videotaped play sequences (utilizing a developmental video library of four bonobos and a chimpanzee, taken from the ages of 0 – 48 months) over a number of episodes – paying attention to the repetition of sequences, schematization, and gestures that frequently appear at various points in the behavioral stream.

Additional investigations will explore the co-development of language and deictic (pointing) gestures, iconic (visually representational) gestures, conventional (lexical representational) gestures and gestural combinations. These will be, in the main, developmental studies utilizing the video database and an utterance database that details all utterances made at the keyboard for Panbanisha and Panpanzee. However, we will also utilize known experimental methodologies to explore the distinction between declarative and imperative e pointing and the possible comprehension and use of declarative points by the bonobo group. Finally, a further set of investigations will include an exploration of developmental use of co-construction of combinations by apes and their human caregivers and a series of experiments to explore the use of conversational repair.

Performance Sites:
» Center on the Evolution of Intelligence Osborne Laboratories
» New York Aquarium, Wildlife Conservation Society, Brooklyn, NY
» Great Ape Trust of Iowa, Des Moines, IA
» College of Staten Island, Staten Island, NY

RELATED PUBLICATIONS
» Culture Prefigures Cognition in Pan/Homo Bonobos
» Cultural Apprenticeship: Social Processes In The Ontogeny of Object Use in Pan paniscus
» Behavioral and Neuroanotomical Asymmetries In Bonobos, Pan paniscus
» Development of Language, Gesture and Play In Bonobos
» Comparative Analysis of Orangutan and Bonobo Numerical Competence
» Basic Memory Processes In Bonobos
» Conversational Vocal Exchanges Among Bonobos
» Multimodal Analysis of Communicative Behavior In Bonobos
» Investigations of Skill Acquisition and Site Formation Processes with Groups of Stone-tool Making Apes
» Music Perception, Learning, and Production In Apes
» Learning and Cognition Same Different Conceptualization and Cross Modal Matching