#Chimpanzee screaming sound series

(Adult English speakers tend to have tens of thousands of words at their disposal.) This study shows that chimps have the vocal repertoire to convey something meaningful. If a chimp can only make six sounds, it’s not going to make a great conversationalist, even for other members of its kind. It’s possible that the order of the sequences matter, however: Certain chimp sounds tended to come at the beginning of phrases, while others were always placed at the end.īut even without a simian Rosetta Stone, the mix-and-match nature of the calls is the foundation for a more complicated vocal system that resembles a language.

For example, it’s possible that a hoot in response to a predator has a subtly different tone than a hoot for a meeting between relatives.īortolato and her colleagues also didn’t figure out what the phrases they recorded meant. It’s possible that the study missed even more subtle building blocks of calls because chimps use calls that superficially sound similar to people, but appear to be used in a wide range of situations. By combining the letters, the chimps had roughly 400 calls in their vocabulary. Sometimes, they combined two separate “units” into much longer phrases-two-thirds of the primates were heard belting out five-part cries. To figure out whether the primates were stringing together intentional phrases in their pants, the team of linguists needed to figure out if certain sequences showed up more than they would by pure chance.Īs it turns out, chimps are particularly fond of a few combinations: hoot-pant-grunt, hoot-pant-hoot, and pant-hoot-pant-scream. The pants are used to communicate through the jungle, making them particularly tantalizing for people trying to understand chimp talk. They can either spit out a single noise, or “pant” a string of them, inhaling between each beat.

After capturing 900 hours of primate sounds, she and colleagues from France and Switzerland sat down to pick apart the structure of those calls.īiologists previously knew that chimpanzees build their calls out of a handful of distinct sounds, almost like letters: grunts, hoos, barks, screams, and roars.

Over the course of 2019 and into 2020, Tatiana Bortolato, a PhD student from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, spent dawn to dusk following and recording 46 adult chimps in Taï National Park in Côte d’Ivoire.

#Chimpanzee screaming sound series

And sometimes, they scream, then grunt, then bark, and then scream, all in a row.Īnd according to a study published today in the journal Communications Biology, that series of expressions might carry its own meaning, almost like a chimp phrase. Chimps string together hoots, grunts, and screams in ways that might have complicated meanings.