Descripción del proyecto
Hablar por turnos en la comunicación humana y la animal
La evolución del lenguaje siguen siendo un misterio. Recientemente, algunos estudiosos han sugerido que el hablar por turnos puede acortar la brecha entre la comunicación humana y la animal. Sin embargo, la falta de datos comparativos y las deficiencias metodológicas hacen difícil una comprensión en profundidad de las similitudes y diferencias del hablar por turnos humano y animal. El proyecto TURNTAKING, financiado con fondos europeos, investigará la producción y la comprensión del hablar por turnos en cuatro sistemas modelo de primates: niños humanos, chimpancés (uno de los parientes vivos más cercanos de los humanos), geladas (una especie de mono del Viejo Mundo) y titíes comunes (una especie de mono del Nuevo Mundo). Combinará paradigmas y medidas del análisis conversacional y la primatología para probar si el hablar por turnos es algo exclusivamente humano, que evolucionó independiente, o constituye un antiguo mecanismo del linaje de los primates.
Objetivo
Language — the most distinctive human trait — remains a ‘mystery’1 or even a ‘problem’2 for evolutionary theory. It is underpinned by cooperative turn-taking3, which has been implicated with highly sophisticated cognitive skills such as mindreading4. Some have claimed that this turn-taking system is uniquely human5,6, but others argue that it provides the evolutionary ‘missing link’ between animal and human communication7. This debate has been constrained by a lack of comparative data, methodological confounds that often prevent meaningful comparisons, and a lack of information on key components of social relationships8,9 that might strongly impact upon turn-taking propensities.
Objectives. TURNTAKING will quantify turn-taking production and comprehension in human children, chimpanzees, and two distantly related species — geladas and common marmosets. It will apply a powerful combination of systematic behavioral observations, eye-tracking paradigms, and established measures from Conversational Analysis3,10 and Primatology9 that allow the same type of data to be collected and analyzed in directly comparable ways across species. This will provide the first rigorous test of whether cooperative turn-taking is uniquely human, ancestral in the primate lineage, or evolved independently in different species. TURNTAKING will identify which hallmarks of human turn-taking are shared across different primate species, and which key components of relationship quality8,9 act upon turn-taking skills.
Outcomes. This project will found the field of comparative turn-taking, and provide pioneering insights into the behavioral flexibility underlying different turn-taking systems. It will go beyond the state of the art by exposing whether cooperative turn-taking is the evolutionary ‘missing link’ between our species and our inarticulate primate cousins, and whether pro-social behaviors drove its emergence.
Palabras clave
Programa(s)
Régimen de financiación
ERC-COG - Consolidator GrantInstitución de acogida
49074 Osnabrueck
Alemania