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Bonobos use a kind of syntax once thought to be unique to humans
The way bonobos combine vocal sounds to create new meanings suggests the evolutionary building blocks of human language are shared with our closest relatives
The issue was that biologists didn’t have the tools to assign a clear meaning to animal vocalisations, says Mélissa Berthet at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, so they couldn’t be certain if a combination was trivial or non-trivial. Berthet and her colleagues spent years learning and tweaking methods from linguistics to try to find unambiguous evidence of non-trivial compositionality in our closest living relatives. To reveal the meaning of each call, they used a technique from linguistics to create a cloud of utterance types, placing vocalisations that occurred in similar circumstances closer together.
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