Principal Investigator:
Paul J. Thibault
Professor of Linguistics and Media Communications
Agder University College

Co-Investigator:
E. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh
Lead Specialist
Great Ape Trust of Iowa

Research Associate:
William M. Fields
Great Ape Trust of Iowa

Consultant:
James D. Benson
York University

William S. Greaves
York University

Tiberiu Spircu
University of Bucharest

Phonetics Coder:
Meena Debashis
Independent Scholar

MULTIMODAL ANALYSIS OF COMMUNICATIVE BEHAVIOR IN BONOBOS

OVERVIEW

The goal of this research project is to investigate how emergent patterns of meaning-making on the here-now scale become the basis for complex patterns on larger scales. The specific aims of the project are: to investigate how environmental and bodily resources function as cognitive scaffolding in linguistically mediated interactions between human caregivers and bonobos; to investigate how bonobos, in their interactions with humans, exploit a whole array of somatic and extra-somatic multimodal resources – lexigrams, voices, movement, gaze, body posture, tools, and so on – in order to lock into a human cultural world; to establish whether there is reliable evidence for the whole or a subset of the English phoneme system in some of the vocalizations of the Great Ape Trust bonobos; to investigate to what extent socio-cognitive development in bonobos is influenced by (a) human culture; and (b) language. The following research design and methods will be adopted: (1) the development of a multimodal discourse-analytical approach to the meaning-making activities in which teaching, learning, and linguistic and cognitive development take place in bonobo-human interaction; (2) the development of appropriate methods of multimodal transcription, discourse analysis, and data collection; (3) the development of a phonological and phonetic study of bonobo vocalizations and their relationship to English phonology in relation to points (1) and (2) above. In the longer term, the research will have implications for the emergence of language in human and non-human primates and the ways in which language capacities in the two species impact upon their cognitive development.

Performance Sites:
» Great Ape Trust of Iowa, Des Moines, Iowa
» Agder University College, Kristiansand , Norway

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