Vocal_communication

Impact of predator model presentation paradigms on titi monkey alarm sequences

Predator presentation experiments are widely used to investigate animal alarm vocalizations. They usually involve presentations of predator models or playbacks of predator calls, but it remains unclear whether the two paradigms provide similar …

Animal linguistics in the making: the Urgency Principle and titi monkeys’ alarm system

The emergent field of animal linguistics applies linguistics tools to animal data in order to investigate potential linguistic-like properties of their communication. One of these tools is the “Urgency Principle”, a pragmatic principle stating that …

Titi monkeys combine alarm calls to create probabilistic meaning

Previous work suggested that titi monkeys *Callicebus nigrifrons* combine two alarm calls, the A- and B-calls, to communicate about predator type and location. To explore how listeners process these sequences, we recorded alarm call sequences of six …

Contextual encoding in titi monkey alarm call sequences

Many primates produce one type of alarm call to a broad range of events, usually terrestrial predators and non-predatory situations, which raises questions about whether primate alarm calls should be considered ‘functionally referential’. A recent …