Articlegold2020

Nonadjacent dependency processing in monkeys, apes, and humans

Stuart K. Watson · Judith Maria Burkart · Steven J. Schapiro · Susan P. Lambeth · Jutta L. Mueller · Simon William Townsend

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Language and cultural evolution Primate Behavior and Ecology Animal Vocal Communication and Behavior

Abstract

The ability to track syntactic relationships between words, particularly over distances ("nonadjacent dependencies"), is a critical faculty underpinning human language, although its evolutionary origins remain poorly understood. While some monkey species are reported to process auditory nonadjacent dependencies, comparative data from apes are missing, complicating inferences regarding shared ancestry. Here, we examined nonadjacent dependency processing in common marmosets, chimpanzees, and humans using "artificial grammars": strings of arbitrary acoustic stimuli composed of adjacent (nonhumans) or nonadjacent (all species) dependencies. Individuals from each species (i) generalized the grammars to novel stimuli and (ii) detected grammatical violations, indicating that they processed the dependencies between constituent elements. Furthermore, there was no difference between marmosets and chimpanzees in their sensitivity to nonadjacent dependencies. These notable similarities between monkeys, apes, and humans indicate that nonadjacent dependency processing, a crucial cognitive facilitator of language, is an ancestral trait that evolved at least ~40 million years before language itself.

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References

2002The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve?1967Implicit learning of artificial grammars 1992Origins of knowledge.2016Great apes anticipate that other individuals will act according to false beliefs 2004Computational Constraints on Syntactic Processing in a Nonhuman Primate 2015Domain generality versus modality specificity: the paradox of statistical learning 2012Identification of the Social and Cognitive Processes Underlying Human Cumulative Culture 2019Great apes use self-experience to anticipate an agent’s action in a false-belief test

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