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Taking turns: The ‘missing’ link in language evolution?

Description du projet

La prise de parole dans la communication humaine et animale

L’évolution du langage reste un mystère. Récemment, des universitaires ont suggéré l’idée que la prise de parole pourrait combler les lacunes entre la communication humaine et animale. Toutefois, le manque de données comparatives et de méthodologie appropriée entravent la compréhension approfondie des similarités et des différences dans la prise de parole humaine et animale. Le projet TURNTAKING, financé par l’UE, examinera la production et la compréhension de la prise de parole dans quatre systèmes modèles de primates: les enfants humains, les chimpanzés (l’un des plus proches parents vivants des humains), les géladas (une espèce de singe de l’Ancien Monde) et les ouistitis communs (une espèce de singe du Nouveau Monde). Il combinera des paradigmes et des mesures issus de l’analyse conversationnelle et de la primatologie pour vérifier si la prise de parole est uniquement humaine, si elle résulte d’une évolution indépendante, ou si elle représente un ancien mécanisme dans la lignée des primates.

Objectif

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.

Régime de financement

ERC-COG - Consolidator Grant

Institution d’accueil

UNIVERSITAET OSNABRUECK
Contribution nette de l'UE
€ 1 999 795,00
Adresse
NEUER GRABEN/SCHLOSS 29
49074 Osnabrueck
Allemagne

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Région
Niedersachsen Weser-Ems Osnabrück, Kreisfreie Stadt
Type d’activité
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Liens
Coût total
€ 1 999 795,00

Bénéficiaires (1)