Profile

Abstract

My research focuses on the communicative system of one of our closest living relatives: the chimpanzee. Analysing the structure and usage of signals deployed by non-human animals can shed light on the evolutionary pathway of language. Do humans and chimpanzees share the same communicative abilities? What are the cognitive mechanisms enabling communication? Which selective pressures lead to the evolution of language? These are some of the broader questions involved in my research.

For my PhD in the Human Biology & Primate Cognition group I am probing chimpanzee multimodal signals for potential combinatorial structures. Given that combinatoriality is a core feature of human language, the investigation of comparable structures in other primate species is crucial to uncover the evolutionary origins of this trait.