Talking about communication between animals, in 1980 Robert M. Seyfarth and his team have discovered that monkeys have three different alarm calls for different predator which shows there has semantic communication between monkeys. Base on that, group of researchers from the University of Pennsylvania conducted a research about distinguished perceptual and conceptual semanticity in Monkey’s semantic communication.
The subject of this study was diana monkey who can produce different alarm calls in response to both eagles and leopard, two of their main predators. In the previous work, the results indicated that the presentation of acoustic predator models provides a reliable of simulating predator presence for diana monkey. To test diana monkey attended to the acoustic-perceptual alone or both the acoustic-perceptual and semantic-conceptual features of the alarm call, four different vocalizations were used—growls of an African leopard, shrieks of a crowned eagle, diana monkey’s leopard alarm call and eagle alarm call.
Research has been set up in three condition—baseline, test and control. In the baseline condition, subject will hear a predator call first, after 5 minutes the same predator call will play. In this condition both the acoustic and the semantic features had to remain constant, so the subject should respond strongly to the first call but to respond weakly to the second call. In the test condition, the subject will hear a diana monkey alarm call first, after 5 minutes the corresponding call of the actual predator will play. If subject only attended to the acoustic-perceptual features, both calls will get a strong response; if subject also attended to the semantic-conceptual features, the second call will get a weak response. In the control condition, subject will hear an alarm call first, after 5 minutes call of another, noncorresponding, predator will play. In this condition both the acoustic and the semantic features are different, so the subject should respond strongly to both calls.
The results show that diana monkey attended to both the acoustic-perceptual and semantic-conceptual features of the male alarm call which suggest that diana monkey is not just responding to the sound understand the meaning of the alarm calls.
Reference: Zuberbühler, K., Cheney, D. L., & Seyfarth, R. M. (1999). Conceptual semantics in a nonhuman primate. Journal Of Comparative Psychology, 113(1), 33-42. doi:10.1037/0735-7036.113.1.33
