Communication, when defined as an act intended to affect the psychological state of another
individual, demands the use of inference. Either the signaler, the recipient, or both must …

When we compare human gestures to those of other apes, it looks at first like there is
nothing much to compare at all. In adult humans, gestures are thought to be a window into …

Both vocalization and gesture are universal modes of communication and fundamental
features of language development. The gestural origins theory proposes that language …

Compositionality refers to a structural property of human language, according to which the
meaning of a complex expression is a function of the meaning of its parts and the way they …

In this bottom-up study of gesture, we focused on the details of a single gesture, Touch. We
compared characteristics of use by three young chimpanzees with those of 11 adults, their …

Highlights•Animal audience effect studies often focus on rate and latency changes in
signals.•Human audience effect studies focus on fine-grained changes in signals.•Fine …

While the ultimate consequences of social bonds start to be better understood, the proximate
behavioural mechanisms underlying the formation and maintenance of these close affiliative …

Against the prior view that primate communication is based only on signal decoding,
comparative evidence suggests that primates are able, no less than humans, to intentionally …

This article examines a popular trend of postulating that gestures have played a crucial role
in the emergence of human language. Language evolution is frequently understood as a …

The extent to which primates can flexibly adjust the production of gestural communication
according to the presence and visual attention of the audience provides key insights into the …