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Related Experiment Video

Updated: May 28, 2026

Dissociation of the Confounding Influences of Expectancy and Integrative Difficulty Residing in Anomalous Sentences in Event-related Potential Studies

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Call combinations in monkeys: compositional or idiomatic expressions?

Kate Arnold¹, Klaus Zuberbühler

¹Centre for Social Learning and Cognitive Evolution, School of Psychology, University of St. Andrews, St. Andrews, Fife KY16 9JP, UK. ka11@st-andrews.ac.uk

Brain and Language

|October 29, 2011

Summary

Putty-nosed monkeys combine calls into sequences, but they treat these sequences as single units, not by decoding individual calls. This offers a limited way to expand messages within their innate vocal repertoire.

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Area of Science:

Primate communication
Animal vocalizations
Evolution of language

Background:

Human language syntax is unique, unlike holistic animal vocalizations.
Putty-nosed monkeys combine two call types into sequences for distinct messages.

Purpose of the Study:

Investigate if 'pyow-hack' sequences in putty-nosed monkeys are compositional.
Determine if individual calls contribute to the overall meaning of sequences.

Main Methods:

Observational study of putty-nosed monkey vocalizations.
Analysis of 'pyow-hack' call sequences and monkey behavioral responses.

Main Results:

Monkeys perceived 'pyow-hack' sequences as idiomatic expressions.
Evidence suggests monkeys did not decode the meaning from individual calls within sequences.

Conclusions:

Putty-nosed monkey call sequences lack generative syntax.
This system allows for message expansion using a limited, innate call repertoire.