Dr. Marlen Fröhlich is a primatologist specialising in great ape communication, behavioural plasticity and comparative approaches to the study of language evolution. Over the past decade, she has been studying the communicative behaviour of four different great ape species across various research settings, which allowed her to tease apart individual-, population- and species-level variation. Currently, she is the head of the Freigeist Junior Research Group "Pathways to language: The role of communicative plasticity in joint action coordination".
ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Marlen-Froehlich
Twitter: https://twitter.com/marlenfroehlich
Selected Publications:
1. Fröhlich, M., & van Schaik, C. P. (2022). Social tolerance and interactional opportunities as drivers of gestural redoings in orang-utans. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 377: 20210106. DOI:10.1098/rstb.2021.0106
2. Fröhlich M., van Schaik C. P., van Noordwijk M. A., Knief U. (2022). Individual variation and plasticity in the infant-directed communication of orang-utan mothers. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 289: 20220200. DOI:10.1098/rspb.2022.0200
3. Fröhlich M., Bartolotta N., Fryns C., Wagner C., Momon L, Jaffrezic M, Mitra Setia T., Schuppli C., van Noordwijk M. A., van Schaik C.P. (2021). Orangutans have larger gestural repertoires in captivity than in the wild – a case of weak innovation? iScience 24: 103304. DOI:10.1016/j.isci.2021.103304
4. Fröhlich M., Sievers C., Townsend S.W., Gruber T., van Schaik C.P. (2019). Multimodal communication and language origins: integrating gestures and vocalizations. Biological Reviews 94: 1809–1829. DOI:10.1111/brv.12535
5. Fröhlich M., Kuchenbuch P.H., Müller G., Fruth B., Furuichi T., Wittig R.M., Pika S. (2016). Unpeeling the layers of language: Bonobos and chimpanzees engage in cooperative turn-taking sequences. Scientific Reports 6: 25887. DOI:10.1038/srep25887