What do humans, dolphins, elephants and marmosets have in common? The answer has just been given in the review. ScienceAn Israeli team has announced that among the small South American monkeys, each individual has a vocal “label” that its peers use to address it, a property hitherto reserved for the other three mammals.
David Omer’s lab at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem recorded exchanges between captive individuals, with or without the ability to see each other. They then had these vocalizations analyzed, in particular the small cries called “Phi calls”using artificial intelligence methods. They found that it was possible to detect who an individual was speaking to from these calls alone, that two related marmosets used the same call to address a third person, and that, on the contrary, a monkey responded more to a conspecific by using its “name”. The Israeli researchers now intend to study other monkey species with greater precision using these new methods.
The study did not stop there. It highlighted the social nature of language learning: the little monkeys learn the basics from their parents. It also observed that individuals engage in dialogue or at least take turns speaking, a rare skill among animals. Israeli researchers have not been able to “crack” the code used by the monkeys. We do not know, at the moment, what encodes the identity of an interlocutor in the phee llama (duration, height, intensity, etc.). However, the article is 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.
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The French researcher points out, however, that while all the results can be perfectly explained by the presence of a name in the vocalizations, there are other reasons. “a little different” could also contribute to the observed results. “For example, if a marmoset is particularly agitated, anyone could approach it and try to calm it down.explains. If an individual is dominant, everyone will speak to him respectfully, etc. This can be detected by the intonation we 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 clearly highlighted a “individual sound stamp”far from being the only positioning cry attributed so far to phee llamaThis peculiarity could have appeared in marmosets due to their particular lifestyle: small communities installed in particularly dense canopies.
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