Human language is characterised by the intentional, flexible, meaningful and rule-governed use of communicative signals. In order to unravel the evolutionary roots of this highly complex behaviour, animal communication research has focused on looking for pre-cursors of these complex cognitive capacities in our primate ancestors.
My work has contributed to this by investigating the vocal production of chimpanzees. I will present the results of two recently completed experimental field studies, which have investigated whether chimpanzees are capable of recipient-directed and intentional vocal communication, in light of current theories of language evolution.

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