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      Nonadjacent dependency processing in monkeys, apes, and humans

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          Abstract

          Artificial grammar experiments show that marmosets and chimpanzees can process nonadjacent decencies, a key feature of human language.

          Abstract

          The ability to track syntactic relationships between words, particularly over distances (“nonadjacent dependencies”), is a critical faculty underpinning human language, although its evolutionary origins remain poorly understood. While some monkey species are reported to process auditory nonadjacent dependencies, comparative data from apes are missing, complicating inferences regarding shared ancestry. Here, we examined nonadjacent dependency processing in common marmosets, chimpanzees, and humans using “artificial grammars”: strings of arbitrary acoustic stimuli composed of adjacent (nonhumans) or nonadjacent (all species) dependencies. Individuals from each species (i) generalized the grammars to novel stimuli and (ii) detected grammatical violations, indicating that they processed the dependencies between constituent elements. Furthermore, there was no difference between marmosets and chimpanzees in their sensitivity to nonadjacent dependencies. These notable similarities between monkeys, apes, and humans indicate that nonadjacent dependency processing, a crucial cognitive facilitator of language, is an ancestral trait that evolved at least ~40 million years before language itself.

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          Most cited references51

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          The Psychophysics Toolbox

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            The Psychophysics Toolbox.

            D Brainard (1997)
            The Psychophysics Toolbox is a software package that supports visual psychophysics. Its routines provide an interface between a high-level interpreted language (MATLAB on the Macintosh) and the video display hardware. A set of example programs is included with the Toolbox distribution.
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              A brief guide to model selection, multimodel inference and model averaging in behavioural ecology using Akaike’s information criterion

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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Sci Adv
                Sci Adv
                SciAdv
                advances
                Science Advances
                American Association for the Advancement of Science
                2375-2548
                October 2020
                21 October 2020
                : 6
                : 43
                : eabb0725
                Affiliations
                [1 ]Department of Comparative Language Science, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.
                [2 ]Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Language Evolution, Zurich, Switzerland.
                [3 ]Anthropological Institute and Museum, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.
                [4 ]UT MD Anderson Cancer Research Center, Bastrop, TX, USA.
                [5 ]Department of Experimental Medicine, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark.
                [6 ]Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Osnabrück, Osnabrück, Germany.
                [7 ]Department of Linguistics, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria.
                [8 ]Department of Psychology, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK.
                Author notes
                [* ]Corresponding author. Email: swatso88@ 123456gmail.com
                [†]

                These authors contributed equally as co–last authors.

                Author information
                http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1150-6288
                http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6229-525X
                http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5406-1739
                http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9201-321X
                http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5463-9585
                http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1504-1801
                Article
                abb0725
                10.1126/sciadv.abb0725
                7577713
                33087361
                14adb577-b6d1-4b22-91d6-660de8596fca
                Copyright © 2020 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC).

                This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license, which permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, so long as the resultant use is not for commercial advantage and provided the original work is properly cited.

                History
                : 28 January 2020
                : 08 September 2020
                Funding
                Funded by: doi http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100001711, Swiss National Science Foundation;
                Award ID: PP00P3_163850
                Funded by: doi http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100001711, Swiss National Science Foundation;
                Award ID: 31003A_172979
                Categories
                Research Article
                Research Articles
                SciAdv r-articles
                Anthropology
                Psychological Science
                Psychological Science
                Custom metadata
                Nielsen Marquez

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