Mélissa Berthet

Mélissa Berthet
University of Zurich | UZH · Department of Comparative Language Science

PhD

About

34
Publications
9,053
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183
Citations

Publications

Publications (34)
Preprint
While research over the last 20 years has shed important light on the vocal behaviour of our closest living relatives, bonobos and chimpanzees, a quantitative description of their full vocal repertoire is absent. Such data are critical for a holistic understanding of a species` communication system and unpacking how these systems compare more broad...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
There are hundreds of extant species of primate. Is it a coincidence that the only known species to develop fluid speech was part of the species-poor primate clade characterized by substantially greater relative body size? In this position paper, we discuss pertinent evidence from four species of American monkey, seven species of Afroeurasian monke...
Article
Full-text available
Can non-human animals combine abstract representations much like humans do with language? In particular, can they entertain a compositional representation such as ‘not blue’? Across two experiments, we demonstrate that baboons (Papio papio) show a capacity for compositionality. Experiment 1 showed that baboons can entertain negative, compositional,...
Article
Full-text available
Predator presentation experiments are widely used to investigate animal alarm vocalizations. They usually involve presentations of predator models or playbacks of predator calls, but it remains unclear whether the two paradigms provide similar results, a major limitation when investigating animal syntactic and semantic capacities. Here, we investig...
Article
Full-text available
The evolution of language has been investigated by several research communities, including biologists and linguists, striving to highlight similar linguistic capacities across species. To date, however, no consensus exists on the linguistic capacities of non‐human species. Major controversies remain on the use of linguistic terminology, analysis me...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Planting fodder trees in grasslands increases vegetation diversity, reduces grassland vulnerability to climate change and provides additional fodder resource during periods of drought. However, the palatability of temperate fodder trees remains poorly studied. During 10 mornings in July 2021, we allowed 12 dairy cows to feed freely in a 4-year-old...
Article
The emergent field of animal linguistics applies linguistics tools to animal data in order to investigate potential linguistic-like properties of their communication. One of these tools is the “Urgency Principle”, a pragmatic principle stating that in an alarm sequence, calls providing information about the nature or location of a threat must come...
Article
Platyrrhini are highly vulnerable to the yellow fever (YF) virus. From 2016 to 2018, the Atlantic Forest of southeast Brazil faced its worst sylvatic YF outbreak in about a century, thought to have killed thousands of primates. It is essential to assess the impact of this epidemic on threatened primate assemblages to design effective conservation s...
Preprint
Full-text available
The evolution of language is investigated by various research communities (including biologists and linguists) which engage in comparative works to highlight similar linguistic capacities across species. So far though, no consensus exists on linguistic capacities of nonhuman species. Rather, vivid debates have emerged, mostly fuelled by misuses of...
Article
Full-text available
“Conversation rules” such as overlap avoidance and coordinated overlap have been reported in nonhuman animals, and seem to be adaptive responses to the requirements of social life. Some species display both patterns in an apparently flexible way, but the social factors mediating their respective usage remain poorly documented. We investigated the p...
Preprint
Full-text available
A series of field studies in chimpanzees have shown that the examination of communicative behaviour (e.g. alarm calling) could be particularly fruitful to help uncover mind-reading abilities in non-human animals. In this study, we sought to extend communication-based protocols to one species of Cercopithecids. Specifically, we looked at whether soc...
Article
Full-text available
For arboreal primates, ground use may increase dispersal opportunities, tolerance to habitat change, access to ground-based resources, and resilience to human disturbances, and so has conservation implications. We collated published and unpublished data from 86 studies across 65 localities to assess titi monkey (Callicebinae) terrestriality. We exa...
Article
Full-text available
Previous work suggested that titi monkeys Callicebus nigrifrons combine two alarm calls, the A- and B-calls, to communicate about predator type and location. To explore how listeners process these sequences, we recorded alarm call sequences of six free-ranging groups exposed to terrestrial and aerial predator models, placed on the ground or in the...
Poster
Full-text available
In several primate species’ vocal repertoire, alarm calls cohabit so that one is deemed ‘specific’ (it only occurs when a certain stimulus is present, e.g., an aerial predator) and the other ‘general’ (it is elicited by a set of stimuli that may be greater than, and may include, the set of stimuli eliciting the so-called ‘specific’ calls). The ques...
Presentation
Although call sequences have the potential to convey more information than single call utterances, they constitute an under-researched area in the field of animal communication. Black-fronted titi monkeys Callicebus nigrifrons emit A-calls to aerial predators and B-calls to terrestrial predators, and previous work has suggested that the two calls c...
Presentation
Les singes titi à front noir Callicebus nigrifrons possèdent deux cris d'alarme de courte portée : les cris A, spécifiques aux menaces de la canopée telles que les capucins et les rapaces, et les cris B, des cris généraux émis en présence de prédateurs terrestres ou lorsque les singes descendent près du sol en l'absence de prédateur. Les titis comb...
Poster
Full-text available
Les recherches récentes sur la communication des primates non humains montrent qu’ils sont capables de communication parfois très sophistiquée, car sous-tendues par des capacités d’intentionnalité ou de référentialité. Certaines études suggèrent même que les primates seraient capables d’ajuster leur communication à l’état de connaissance de leurs c...
Preprint
Full-text available
Methods from formal semantics have recently been used to analyse the meaning of two soft alarm calls of Titi monkeys. Authors suggested that A-calls refer to "serious non-ground threat". We argue that this specification is redundant and suggest simplifying the meaning of A-calls to "serious threat".
Article
Full-text available
General calls are present in the vocal repertoire of a great number of animal species. Because of their lack of context specificity, they are typically argued to possess blurred meaning, or even no meaning at all. Although recent animal cognition studies have demonstrated a growing interest in these vocalizations, there is currently no clear defini...
Thesis
Full-text available
The comparative approach aims to understand the uniqueness of human language and how it evolved from primitive communication systems. Black-fronted titi monkeys Callicebus nigrifrons possess two soft alarm calls: A-calls are specific to threats within the canopy while B-calls are general calls emitted to terrestrial predators but also in non-predat...
Article
Full-text available
Many primates produce one type of alarm call to a broad range of events, usually terrestrial predators and non-predatory situations, which raises questions about whether primate alarm calls should be considered ‘functionally referential’. A recent example is black-fronted titi monkeys, Callicebus nigrifrons, which emit sequences of B-calls to terre...
Presentation
Titi monkeys (Callicebus nigrifrons) produce two acoustically simple alarm calls, the A and B-calls. A-calls functionally refer to threats within or above the canopy, such as raptors and capuchin monkeys. B-calls are given in a broader context, which includes terrestrial predators, when the caller is moving near the forest ground or when disturbed...
Poster
Full-text available
During vocal signalling, animals often combine distinct acoustic units into sequences. Studies on the information encoded in such sequences mostly focuses on the unit level, while research on the information conveyed by sequence composition and structure is still in its beginnings. Indeed, the holistic analysis of sequence composition, temporal str...
Presentation
Previous work has shown that titi monkeys, Callicebus nigrifrons, emit different sequences of A- and B-calls to various predation events, and data have been consistent with the interpretation that these sequences can convey information about both the predator’s type and its location. In the current study, we tried to replicate these findings by pre...
Poster
Full-text available
Primate alarm calls to aerial predators are typically very predator-specific, while alarm calls to terrestrial predators are often also given in non-predatory contexts. However, various studies have demonstrated that some primate call types can be discriminated as context-specific acoustic variants. In titi monkeys, A-calls are emitted to both rapt...
Conference Paper
Le langage est un système intentionnel complexe qui implique des liens étroits entre la parole et les gestes au niveau comportemental et cérébral. Il est courant de produire des mouvements de mains synchronisés avec l'usage de la parole. Certains auteurs soutiennent l'hypothèse de l'existence d'un système linguistique vocal/gestes intégré dans lequ...

Questions

Questions (2)
Question
I have a statistical question:
For a research project, I collected data (i.e., I recorded sounds) and a master student is processing it (i.e., measuring each sound), but it takes a lot of time to process the data. For his master thesis, he used a sample of X sounds, and conducted preliminary stats.
Now, we want to continue the work to publish it, and wonder whether we need to process more data and if so, how many, so that i) he does not spend too much time coding "unnecessary" sounds and ii) we have reliable results.
I think that a power analysis could be the answer, but I read everywhere that power analysis must be only conducted on pilot data. Can we consider that the X sounds he coded are pilot data? If so, can we include them in the final article if we run a power analysis on this sample size?
In other word: can we do a power analysis during the study to estimate when he can stop collecting data?
Importantly: the stats he conducted for his Msc thesis are not the ones we will keep in the article because these are simple and probably a little wrong (he was in a rush to finish before the deadline!) and I want to run more elegant tests for the final article. So we are completely blind to the results, we have no p-value yet or anything. Just to clarify that we are not trying to p-hack the paper! :)
Many thanks for your input!
Question
Hello ! I am looking for studies investigating animals that learn and understand the meaning of a word. I have an example with a dog (Kaminski et al., 2004), and of course Pepperberg's parrots and the great apes Washoe, Koko, Chantek, Kanzi etc, but I have troubles to find more studies (probably a key-word problem, I guess...)
Do you know of other species that were investigated (even if the study shows that they can't learn, no problem)? Thank you in advance !

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