Female rhesus monkeys indulge in baby talk when interacting with their young, a new University of Chicago research has revealed.
Washington, Aug.25 : Female rhesus monkeys indulge in "baby talk" when interacting with their young, a new University of Chicago research has revealed.
"Motherese is a high pitched and musical form of speech, which may be biological in origin. The acoustic structure of particular monkey vocalizations called girneys may be adaptively designed to attract young infants and engage their attention," claimed Dario Maestripieri, Associate Professor in Comparative Human Development at the university.
Maestripieri said these monkey calls were similar to human baby talk.
Mastripieri and his fellow researchers studied the vocalizations exchanged between adult females and their babies on an island off the coast of Puerto Rico. They found that grunts and girneys increasing dramatically when a baby was present in a group of free-ranging rhesus macaques.
They also found that when a baby wandered away from its mother, the other females looked at the baby and vocalized, suggesting that the call was intended for the baby.
"Adult females become highly aroused while observing the infants of other group members," explains lead author of the article, Jessica Whitham, a recent Ph.D. graduate of the University of Chicago.
"The calls appear to be used to elicit infants' attention and encourage their behavior. They also have the effect of increasing social tolerance in the mother and facilitating the interactions between females with babies in general. Thus, the attraction to other females' infants results in a relatively relaxed context of interaction where the main focus of attention is the baby," Maestripieri and his colleagues write in the article.
Researchers have long been interested in the noises that non-human primates make and how they are used for communication.
Monkey vocalizations could be carrying information that the sender expects the recipient to understand, or they could be noises that the recipient can draw inferences from, but are not intended to carry information.
A human sneeze, for instance, is a noise that people understand may be associated with a cold, but it did not develop evolutionarily to convey information.
The study by Maestripieri's team showed that the grunts and girneys emitted by the rhesus macaques fall into the category of vocalizations not intended to convey specific information, and appear to be used to attract other individuals' attention or change their emotional states.
ANI