Mélissa Berthet

Ontogenetic evidence of socially learned call sequences in Western Australian magpies Abstract. Combinatoriality is the capacity to combine discrete vocal elements into larger structures. Previously thought unique to human language, combinat

Young magpies learn to combine calls into "sentences" much like human toddlers: through listening to family and friends!

Now available to read at @royalsocietypublishing.org
@mandyridley.bsky.social @stephanielking.bsky.social @ceb-uwa.bsky.social

royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

📢 SURVEY: Do you use - or have you ever used - drones in marine mammal research? 🐳🐋If so, please complete our short survey and help us map the growing range of ways UAVs are being used around the world for marine mammal monitoring and research: app.onlinesurveys.jisc.ac.uk/s/uhi/drones...

Only 12 years from the day we collected the first data point for this fun project… all my fault! Sorry! Very proud of the spaghetti tube apparatus. As an Italian, walking into the zoo with a pack of spaghetti every testing day made for some fun interactions. Thank you Christoph, Elisa and Josep!

A very interesting job opportunity for an ECR philosopher working at the intersection of human origins and the ethics of science.

Tübingen is a beautiful city with great people in this field (Claudio Tennie and Marlen Frölich, for example).

uni-tuebingen.de/universitaet...

Leipzig U and the MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA) have an open faculty position (W2) in evolutionary population genetics! This position is tenured and comes with generous core funding. We are eager to welcome a new colleague! Deadline March 11.
www.uni-leipzig.de/en/newsdetai...

𝗡𝗼𝘄 𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗻: 𝗠𝗮𝘅 𝗣𝗹𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗸 𝗥𝗲𝘀𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗰𝗵 𝗚𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗽 𝗟𝗲𝗮𝗱𝗲𝗿 𝗣𝗼𝘀𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 (𝗪𝟮)

An exciting opportunity for outstanding researchers ready to lead an independent research group and shape the future of multimodal language research.

Learn more and apply here: www.mpi.nl/career-educa...

Scientists studying wild sooty mangabeys in Ivory Coast have discovered that these West African #monkeys use sophisticated rules when combining their calls into sequences. Read the full #RSOS paper: royalsocietypublishing.org/rsos/article... @aurianelf.bsky.social @tozbu.bsky.social

Fully funded PhD position on primate parochialism! Study how cooperation within groups and conflict between groups evolve in red-fronted lemurs at our long-term field site in Kirindy Forest, Madagascar. @kirindy.bsky.social & @primatenzentrum.bsky.social. Apply here: www.dpz.eu

Some feminists have long contested this view, often using political discourse rather than the scientific method. If gender is socially constructed, they argue, it is "mutable" and can be reshaped through political and social reforms. Feminists often refer to "biological determinism" in a pejorative sense, as they seek to reform society into a genderless one by eliminating what they perceive to be constructed gender traits.

Why did the editors allow him to make claims without citations? Which feminists, where, idk how they do things in geology but at least in neuroscience we cite our sources in an academic paper

We’re hiring a Field Project Manager with the Moyen Bafing Chimpanzee Project!

Help run a growing wild chimpanzee research & conservation project in West Africa 🐵

Apply by 24 Feb (open until filled). More info via QR code in the image. Note: Right to work in the EU required. #job #conservation

📢📢📢Lectureships at Bristol!📢📢📢

We're hiring 3 x lecturers (=assistant professor) in Biological Sciences, across the discipline.

Great department, great colleagues, great building, great city

Details here:
www.bristol.ac.uk/jobs/find/de...

Fantastic opportunity to work with us at Shark Bay Dolphin Research 👇🏻

Recently in France, a philosopher published a book arguing that they are sure animals communicate, and it would be great if researchers started investigating it.
How one can write an entire book on a topic without googling it beforehand is beyond me.

🚨 New paper alert! "Honestly exaggerated: howler monkey roars are reliable signals of body size and behaviourally relevant to listeners"

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

We show that formants advertise body size and mediate social interactions in black and gold howler monkeys.

🚨 JOB ALERT 🚨

2-year postdoc in canine behaviour at Linköping University, Sweden.

#AcademicSky #ScienceJobs

liu.se/en/work-at-l...

Patrícia Izar Interview with Patrícia Izar, who studies the behavioral ecology, plasticity, and cognition of Platyrrhine primates at the University of São Paulo.

Q&A with Patrícia Izar, who is a Professor of Ethology at the University of São Paulo, where she studies the behavioral ecology, plasticity, and cognition of Platyrrhine primates, especially robust capuchin monkeys (Sapajus). www.cell.com/current-biol...

What do we know about vocal communication of emotion between different species of terrestrial tetrapods? Investigating how animals perceive and interpret emotional signals across a variety of species is essential for deepening our understanding of the complexities underlying animal communication and soc...

My second PhD paper is out

What do we know about vocal communication of emotion between different species of terrestrial tetrapods? onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

I was lucky to work on this project with Elodie Briefer (@ebriefer.bsky.social), Katarzyna Pisanski and Florence Levrero.

If you feel bad for not having published all the papers from your PhD yet... This paper is the discussion of my thesis, and it took me about 6 years to publish it!

Thank you to my lovely collaborators @geoffreymesbahi.bsky.social and @maelmleroux.bsky.social for the (much-needed) final push!

J'ai longuement discuté de ce papier avec @evosapiensfr.bsky.social, qui le résume très bien ici 👇

www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6vO...

a man in a leather jacket is making a funny face while looking at the camera . Alt: a man in a leather jacket is making a funny face while looking at the camera .

In other words, emotion-based communication can give rise to sophisticated cognitive processes, particularly on the receiver's side, and thus, provide insightful insights into the evolution of communication - and ultimately, language.

Our answer is YES!
While callers may produce relatively simple signals shaped by immediate emotional arousal, listeners likely enrich these signals pragmatically by integrating background knowledge and, therefore, engage in more complex cognitive processes.

In summary, the alarm calls of titi monkeys do not reflect external events, but the caller's emotional states. Moreover, sequences are not syntactic, but reflect changes in the caller's emotional state. So... Is the vocal system of titi monkeys worth investigating? 🤔

For example, titi monkeys know that raptors are the most dangerous predators and attack from above. When hearing A-calls (i.e., high arousal in the caller), listeners may infer the presence of a severe threat – most likely a raptor – and immediately look upwards to scan for danger.

What is super interesting is that listeners still manage to extract relevant information about the event eliciting alarm sequences.

👇See this playback of A-calls: the monkey knows immediately where to look!

We think it does so by making pragmatic inferences based on prior knowledge.

two women looking at a lantern with the words oh my god oh my god written on the bottom Alt: two women looking at a lantern with the words oh my god oh my god written on the bottom

But what about when these calls are combined into long sequences? We think that these sequences track dynamic changes in arousal over time 📈📉

a close up of a white cat 's face with blue eyes and the words ahhhh written on it . Alt: a close up of a white cat 's face with blue eyes and the words ahhhh written on it .

We found that alarm calls likely reflect the caller's arousal level at the time of emission of the call: A-calls encode high arousal (typically, when they spot a raptor 🦅), B-calls lower arousal (i.e., when any other disturbing event occur 🐯🦌🚶‍♂️)

The ABC‐D of animal linguistics: are syntax and compositionality for real? In several animal species, an alarm call (e.g. ABC notes in the Japanese tit Parus minor) can be immediately followed by a recruitment call (e.g. D notes) to yield a complex call that triggers a thir...

We used a dataset collected from observations, playback experiments and predator presentations during my PhD. We conducted formal linguistic analyses derived from this paper: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...

The As and Bs of titi monkey linguistics: why emotional communication is not the enemy The alarm call sequences of titi monkeys (genera Plecturocebus, Callicebus and Cheracebus) have sparked important debates over whether they exhibit parallels with human language. Some researchers con...

🚨New animal linguistics paper🚨

Together with @geoffreymesbahi.bsky.social and @maelmleroux.bsky.social, we tried to finally answer this question: Do titi monkeys have complex syntactic skills?

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

New paper out👂📢🐒! We highlight the remarkable expertise of local field assistants at BCFS (Uganda) in interpreting chimpanzee pant-hoot calls—identifying who is calling, their age, sex, and context—revealing scientific knowledge built through years of experience. doi.org/10.1098/rspb...

Examining combinatoriality within the pūkeko vocal repertoire Most animals use various vocalizations to communicate with others and coordinate activities. However, animals are limited in the number of sounds they…

My latest article is finally published:
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

we examine how Australasian swamphen (Pukeko) combine different sounds into all the different calls. We also examine call sequences and find that calls become longer along some calling sequences