Human speech is frequently accompanied by movements of the arms and hands termed gestures. The majority of these gestures is invented spontaneously and is highly iconic but some gestures are used functionally in ways very similar to speech that is symbolically, referentially, based on intersubjectively learned and shared social conventions. Our closest living relatives, the great apes also use gestures in their natural communication in a variety of contexts such as play, grooming, sex and agonistic encounters. A deep understanding of apes’ gestural signalling might therefore be helpful to get insight into the evolutionary scenario of human communication and cognition. The present chapter investigates the nature of the gestural signalling of the four great apes, bonobos (Pan paniscus), chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), gorillas (Gorilla gorilla) and orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus), with a special focus on the following three aspects: (1) the intentionality of gestures, (2) their referential use, and (3) similarities and differences to gestures in prelinguistic or just-linguistic human infants.
2010. Semantics of primate gestures: intentional meanings of orangutan gestures. Animal Cognition 13:6 ► pp. 793 ff.
Liebal, Katja & Josep Call
2012. The origins of non-human primates' manual gestures. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 367:1585 ► pp. 118 ff.
Pika, Simone
2016. Response to: Commentary: The use of referential gestures in ravens (Corvus corax) in the wild. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution 4
Pika, Simone & Thomas Bugnyar
2011. The use of referential gestures in ravens (Corvus corax) in the wild. Nature Communications 2:1
Pika, Simone & Marlen Fröhlich
2019. Gestural acquisition in great apes: the Social Negotiation Hypothesis. Animal Cognition 22:4 ► pp. 551 ff.
2018. Do Mechanical Effectiveness and Recipient Species Influence Intentional Signal Laterality in Captive Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes)?. International Journal of Primatology 39:4 ► pp. 602 ff.
Racine, Timothy P., Tyler J. Wereha, Olga Vasileva, Donna Tafreshi & Joseph J. Thompson
2014. The Evolution of Joint Attention: A Review and Critique. In The Evolution of Social Communication in Primates [Interdisciplinary Evolution Research, 1], ► pp. 127 ff.
Salmi, Roberta & Maria Muñoz
2020. The context of chest beating and hand clapping in wild western gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla). Primates 61:2 ► pp. 225 ff.
Schel, Anne Marijke, Axelle Bono, Juliette Aychet, Simone Pika & Alban Lemasson
2022. Intentional gestural communication amongst red-capped mangabeys (Cercocebus torquatus). Animal Cognition 25:5 ► pp. 1313 ff.
Unternbäumen, Enrique Huelva
2017. The codification of intersubjectivity in the diachronic change AD locative > A(D) indirect object in Spanish. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 16:1 ► pp. 107 ff.
2024. Gestural communication in wild spider monkeys (Ateles geoffroyi). Animal Cognition 27:1
Zlatev, Jordan
2014. Bodily Mimesis and the Transition to Speech. In The Evolution of Social Communication in Primates [Interdisciplinary Evolution Research, 1], ► pp. 165 ff.
Zlatev, Jordan, Sławomir Wacewicz, Przemyslaw Zywiczynski & Joost van de Weijer
2017. Multimodal-first or pantomime-first?. Interaction Studies. Social Behaviour and Communication in Biological and Artificial Systems 18:3 ► pp. 465 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 9 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.