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African Elephants Address One Another With Individually Specific Name-Like Calls
Abstract of a paper published on Nature: Personal names are a universal feature of human language, yet few analogues exist in other species. While dolphins and parrots address conspecifics by imitating the calls of the addressee, human names are not imitations of the sounds typically made by the nam...
Abstract of a paper published on Nature: Personal names are a universal feature of human language, yet few analogues exist in other species. Labelling objects or individuals without relying on imitation of the sounds made by the referent radically expands the expressive power of language. Here we present evidence that wild African elephants address one another with individually specific calls, probably without relying on imitation of the receiver.
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