Animal linguistics and the puzzle of titi monkeys alarm sequences

This article aims to ilustrate how animal linguistics can increase our understanding of animal communication using the example of the alarm system of Black-fronted titi monkeys. Titi monkeys produce sequences composed of Aand B-cals in alarm situations. Previous biological and linguistic works investigated the semantics of these utterances but relied on a preliminary dataset. We folowed up on this work by carrying out an extensive analysis of meaning at the cal and sequence level, based on 18 months of field observations and experiments folowed by acoustical and linguistic analyses. Our results suggest that alarm cals refer to the emotional state of the caler at the time of emission of the cal. Listeners most likely attend to the proportion of BB-grams in each sequence, which provides them with information about the caler’s emotional state, to infer what the predator is (aerial or terrestrial) and where it is (ground or canopy) using their world knowledge. Overal, this work suggests that the emotional states of animals can convey complex and reliable information to listeners. Our study ilustrates that combining field data with linguistic analyses provides a powerful new approach to better understand animal communication.