Laterality in the gestural communication of wild chimpanzees

Activity: Talk or presentation typesInvited talk

Description

The gestural communication of captive apes appears to show a right-hand bias in the use of gestures, and this lateralization has been used to argue in favour of the gestural theory of the origin of language. However, to date these studies have been limited to the observation of small groups in captivity. In this study, following several years of field work with the wild Sonso chimpanzee community, we examine a corpus of 4991 cases of intentional gesture for patterns of lateralization.
Period6 Mar 2012
Held atUniversity of London, United Kingdom