2012), and instead support the graded nature of gestural communication (e.g.
2014b Hobaiter and Byrne 2011 Perlman et al. Only a few studies have described the morphology of gestures, but those analyses were fruitful in determining a lack of morphological support for a core concept of the ontogenetic ritualization theory (Bard et al. It is an empirical question whether there is flexibility in the structure of gestures, such that a gesture can have different forms while retaining the same communicative message. 2016), and non-ritualization types of social learning (Marentette and Nicoladis 2012 Perlman et al. 2014b), social negotiation (Frohlich et al.
Other learning processes have been suggested for the development of gestures, including genetic channelling with repertoire tuning (Hobaiter and Byrne 2011), intersubjective co-construction (Bard et al. in a mother–infant dyad: Tomasello et al. This process is thought to account for the presence of idiosyncratic gestures, as ontogenetic ritualization occurs between a specific signaller and specific social partner (e.g. One of the assumptions inherent in the study of gestures in apes is that gestural development proceeds from mechanically effective actions to abbreviated acts that only serve a communicative purpose, in a process Tomasello and colleagues have called ontogenetic ritualization (based on the ethological concept of phylogenetic ritualization, as discussed by Perlman et al. Therefore, gestural communication may provide important information into the evolution of communication, due to the learning-based and flexible nature of gestures (e.g. 2016 for orangutans Perlman and Clark 2015 for gorillas Hopkins and Savage-Rumbaugh 1991 for bonobos). In contrast, vocal communication is thought to primarily convey evolutionary urgent information (predator detection, food sources, etc.) and therefore shows little flexibility (contra Lameira et al. It has been proposed that the variability in gesture use is due to the fact that gestures are used to convey non-urgent communicative content, and therefore can be used more flexibly (Tomasello and Zuberbuehler 2002). whether Touch is rigid or flexible, a la Tomasello et al. With this detailed picture of a single gesture, we evaluate the extent to which its form and use vary across contexts, individuals, and age categories (i.e. 2014b), we compare the use of this gesture in infants and adults. In line with our ideas that gestures develop (e.g. We specify the form used, in terms of the signaller’s behaviour, and the possible sensory perceptions of the receiver, in terms of the places on the body that are touched, i.e. Among the variety of gestures found in the repertoire of apes, our preliminary evidence suggested that this one was among the most flexibly used and flexibly displayed (Herring 2013), and so we choose to investigate only this gesture. Here we apply a different process of developing a gestural repertoire, one that relies on bottom-up processes, to fully describe a gesture used by chimpanzees, the gesture Touch. Few have focused on the details of the form of the gesture to illuminate communicative behaviour. 1977), or focus on the evolution of the cognition underlying communication or language (e.g. 2016 Hobaiter and Byrne 2011 Liebal et al. 1985), establish repertoires of intentionally communicative gestures (e.g. intentionality: Bard 1992 Tomasello et al. Studies of ape gestures have tended to focus on top-down demonstrations of underlying cognitive processes (e.g. Primates have long been used as models for trying to understand the developmental processes that underlie human communication, given humans close genetic relationship with chimpanzees. The results from this study illustrate the importance of contextualized meaning in understanding flexibility in the gesture use of great apes. Thus, we demonstrate that this gesture exhibits flexibility in form and flexibility in use. There was a wide diversity in form–location patterns within each context, and there were no form–location patterns specific to particular contexts. Significant differences were found between infant and adult initiators in the form, target locations, and contexts of the gesture Touch. This single gesture had 36 different forms, was directed to 70 different target locations on the body of social partners, and occurred in 26 different contexts. Five hundred eighty-one observations of the gesture Touch were collected across a four-year time span. We compared characteristics of use by three young chimpanzees with those of 11 adults, their interactive partners, housed in a semi-natural social group at the Kyoto University Primate Research Institute (KUPRI) in Japan.
In this bottom-up study of gesture, we focused on the details of a single gesture, Touch.
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