Modeling Great Ape Signaling Behavior: Evolutionary Roots of Common Ground (A07)

• Subject Area: Applied Linguistics, Computational Linguistics ; Evolution, Anthropology
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 538184825

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.

• DFG Programme: Collaborative Research Centres
• Subproject of: SFB 1718: Common Ground: Cognition - Grammar - Communication
• Applicant Institution: Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen
• Project Heads: Professor Dr. Manuel Bohn; Professor Dr. Michael Franke; Dr. Marlen Fröhlich