Modeling Great Ape Signaling Behavior: Evolutionary Roots of Common Ground
Great ape communication is a critical puzzle piece for understanding the evolution of language, including communicative practices that rely on shared contextual information as a form of common ground. This project seeks to provide novel methodological tools – bespoke probabilistic models – for analyzing observational data from great ape communicative signaling to provide an empirical foundation for theorizing about the evolution of common ground-based communication. Models will be developed to infer contextual meaning of multi-modal signals in newly collected large data sets of orangutan and chimpanzee multimodal signaling behavior in the wild.
