Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

My research focuses on structural and functional properties of human and animal communication. The goal is to identify similarities and differences between the two groups that will help to illuminate the trajectory of human language evolution, which remains one of the most difficult but important problems in contemporary science given the extensive and complex interconnections between language, thought, and behaviour. This proposal focuses on two core features of language, namely its indexical properties, which communicate many personal dimensions of speakers (e.g., their individual identity, sex, age, and body size) that are central to the daily social uses of language; and its representational properties, whereby words communicate additional symbolic information about the world around us. Animal vocal signals have similar indexical properties and, in some cases, can also function representationally a bit like words. Research will therefore pursue additional potential overlap in these properties of human and animal communication. Projects will include examining the priority of voice pitch (F0) versus resonances in indexical discriminations of vocalizer identity, sex, and body size in humans and baboons, as well as extended attributions of speaker attractiveness, authority, status and credibility in humans; the role of learned or evolved biases in such voice-based indexical judgements in humans; and the potential perceptual-cognitive links between evolutionarily ancient indexical dimensions cued by voice F0 and resonances in primates and simple representational contrasts marked by words in contemporary languages. Perceptual experiments will also test for potentially human-like lateralized brain processing of the indexical and representational content of species-specific vocalizations in baboons. Finally, new field studies of the behaviour and communication of red squirrels and wild turkeys will extend the framework of comparative research and provide broader tests of the roles that ecology, sociality, and brain size play in the evolution of representational complexity in animal and human communication.