Upcoming: Bonobos Combine Calls Into Sentence-like Sequences
with Mélissa Berthet
Photo by Lukas Bierhoff, Kokolopori Bonobo Research Project | Olive, a fist time bonobo mother from the Ekalakala community, vocalizing toward distant group members
30 May 2026, 16:00 GMT/ 12:00 EDT/ 09:00 PDT
Bonobos Combine Calls Into Sentence-like Sequences
Compositionality—the capacity to combine meaningful elements into larger structures whose meaning depends on the meanings of the parts and the way they are combined—is a hallmark of human language. In this talk, Dr. Melissa will present new findings on the compositional capacities of wild bonobos. Through a comprehensive investigation of meaning and methods adapted from linguistics, Dr. Melissa will demonstrate that bonobo vocal communication extensively relies on compositionality. These findings suggest that the ability to construct complex meanings from smaller vocal units was already present in our ancestors at least 7 million years ago.
About the Speaker
Dr. Berthet investigates the evolution of human language by exploring its linguistic precursors in nonhuman animals. Her research adopts an interdisciplinary approach, combining field experiments and observations of natural communication in wild animals, cognitive experiments with captive animals, and formal and computational linguistic analyses. In particular, she has studied the alarm call sequences of titi monkeys and compositionality in bonobos.
Dr. Berthet is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Milan. She received her PhD from the University of Neuchâtel in 2018 and subsequently completed postdoctoral training at the École Normale Supérieure, the University of Zurich, and the University of Rennes.
