Periodic Reporting for period 3 - TURNTAKING (Taking turns: The ‘missing’ link in language evolution?)
Reporting period: 2022-01-01 to 2023-06-30
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 Analysis(Sacks et al., 1974; Schegloff, 2007) and Primatology(Fraser et al., 2008) 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 quality (Cords & Aureli, 2000; Fraser et al., 2008) 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.