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The researchers next created their own pyow-hack call combinations, to test their predictions about how the females would respond upon hearing them. Their predictions proved correct. Finally, the scientists played alarm calls made by a strange male to the females, who appeared to ignore what they heard. Since one male putty-nosed monkey sounds very much like the next, this last experiment suggests the vocalization sequences contain information about the identity of the caller, in addition to what he saw and his planned reaction. "If females responded by approaching every stranger male producing pyow-hack sequences, then they would simply be unable to have a normal social life," explained Zuberbuhler. He and Arnold have identified call combinations in a number of other primate species, including gibbons, Campbell's monkeys and olive colobus monkeys, suggesting that "the phenomenon is much more widespread," he said. The researchers believe non-human primates create call sequences to increase the meaning mileage of their small vocal repertoires, which are restricted due to their lack of good tongue control. Marc Hauser, director of the Cognitive Evolution Lab and co-director of the Mind, Brain & Behavior Initiative at Harvard University, told Discovery News that the new research "is a beautiful set of studies," but "how similar or different [monkey call combinations] are to the combinations of words in language remains, however, unclear." Asif Ghazanfar, assistant professor of psychology at Princeton University, told Discovery News that he was also impressed by the new research. For a follow-up experiment, he suggested trying to trip up the female monkey listeners. "One experiment that would've been nice to try is to reverse the order: do playbacks of hack-pyow sequences to see if the temporal order matters to the monkeys, as temporal order can change meaning in human communication," Ghazanfar said. Related Links: Jennifer Viegas' blog: Born Animal |
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