Presidential Faculty Fellow

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Our closest living relatives, the apes, reveal remarkable cognitive and social abilities in the wild, but it is unclear whether they show correspondingly advanced vocal skills. To resolve this issue, this proposal is the first comparative field study of great ape vocal communication. Field observations and experiments will be used to investigate the ontogeny, semantics and function of ape calls. The research promises to clarify the similarities and differences between human and animal vocal communication and to contribute to our understanding of the evolution of speech.