Pyow-hack revisited: Two analyses of Putty-nosed monkey alarm calls

Pyow-Hack Revisited: Two Analyses of Putty-nosed Monkey Alarm Calls*

Male putty-nosed monkeys have two main alarm calls, pyows and hacks. While pyows have a broad distribution suggestive of a general call, hacks are often indicative of eagles. In a series of articles, Arnold and Zuberbühler showed that putty-nosed monkeys sometimes produce distinct pyow-hack sequences made of a small number of pyows followed by a small number of hacks; and that these are predict...

Female Putty-Nosed Monkeys Use Experimentally Altered Contextual Information to Disambiguate the Cause of Male Alarm Calls

Many animal vocal signals are given in a wide range of contexts which can sometimes have little in common. Yet, to respond adaptively, listeners must find ways to identify the cause of a signal, or at least rule out alternatives. Here, we investigate the nature of this process in putty-nosed monkeys, a forest primate. In this species, adult males have a very restricted repertoire of vocalizatio...

Evidence for semantic communication in titi monkey alarm calls

Alarm Calls

Animals commonly vocalize when threatened by a predator. These signals, usually termed alarm calls (from old Italian all arme ‘to arms’ on the approach of an enemy), have continued to bewilder and fascinate for a number of reasons, the first of which is mainly practical. In animal research, it is often difficult to break down the continuous behavioral stream into discrete and meaningful units, ...

Semantics and Pragmatics of Monkey Communication1

Rich data gathered in experimental primatology in the last 40 years are beginning to benefit from analytical methods used in contemporary linguistics, especially in the area of semantics and pragmatics. These methods have started to clarify five questions: (i) what morphology and syntax, if any, do monkey calls have? (ii) what is the 'lexical meaning' of individual calls? (iii) how are the mean...