Social negotiation and “accents” in Western lowland gorillas’ gestural communication

Abstract

Recent findings on chimpanzee infants’ gestural development show that they use some gesture types flexibly and adjust them depending on their interaction partner and social context, suggesting that gestural communication is partly learnt and partly genetically determined. However, how gesture types are shaped by social and demographic factors remains unclear. We addressed this question by focusing on gesture type morphology and conducted a fined-grained analysis of gestural form during intraspecific social-play interactions in two captive groups of Western lowland gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla). We focused on the most frequent gesture types (beat chest, slap body, slap ground and touch body) produced by subadults (infants, juveniles and adolescents). We considered twelve morphological gesture characteristics (e.g., horizontal and vertical hand trajectories, fingers flexion and spread). Our multifactorial investigation shows that morphological characteristics of distinct gesture types can be shaped by social factors, namely signaller’s sociodemographic characteristics (group and kinship), signaller’s behavioural characteristics (body posture) and context-related characteristics (recipient’s sex, attentional state and position in the signaller’s visual field). We nurtured the lively debate concerning gesture origins by revealing the existence of “accents” in non-verbal communication and the highly variable adjustment of gestural form to different conspecifics and interactional characteristics, which supports the revised social negotiation hypothesis.