Title:	Turn-taking in mother-infant interactions across development in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii) in the wild
Authors:	van Boekholt, Bas
ORCID of the author:	https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3399-6938
Thesis advisor:	Pika, Simone
Thesis referee:	Pipa, Gordon Wilkinson, Ray Mitani, John
Abstract:	In his “interaction engine hypothesis” Levinson postulates that the capability of ancient humans to socially interact paved the way for language to evolve (Levinson, 2006; 2016). This ‘interaction engine’ consists of multiple components which have different evolutionary origins and might be shared across the primate lineage. In this thesis I investigated one crucial component of the interaction engine: turn-taking organisation, which refers to the infrastructure of human interaction and can be subdivided in four elements: flexibility, participation frameworks, temporal relationships and adjacency pairs (Sacks et al., 1974; Pika et al., 2018). Studying turn-taking organisation across the primate lineage might help shed light on how ancient humans interacted before the evolution of language. This thesis takes a developmental and holistic approach focusing on the crucial platform of mother-infant interactions in one of our closest living relatives’ chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes). In chapter 3 I explored the understudied aspect of embodied action within interactions using conversation analytic tools. The study introduced the concepts of “bodily affordance” and “intercorporeality” from the field of interaction analysis and applied these to investigate how chimpanzees use their bodies to organise playing interactions. In chapter 4 I investigated the underlying infrastructure of mother-infant interactions focussing on the relative use of signals and actions as well as the two turn-taking elements of temporal relationships and participation frameworks. The results showed that the infrastructure of mother-infant interactions can be characterized by an equal use of signals and actions, a three-second response threshold, and high frequencies of directed gaze and body direction. These characteristics remained remarkably consistent across factors, except for context, in which interactions in the “urgent” context of joint-travel led to relative higher frequencies of actions, quicker response times and lower frequencies of directed gaze and body direction. In chapter 5, I focused on the other two elements of turn-taking: flexibility and adjacency pairs. The results showed the occurrence of many adjacency pair-like sequences as well as the existence of flexible clusters of interchangeable units within mother-infant interactions. Last, in chapter 6 I employed multiple methodologies to investigate a novel potentially idiosyncratic movement used by one mother-infant dyad. The results argue that the movement qualifies as an idiosyncratic gesture. This thesis provides evidence that mother-infant interactions exhibit turn-taking organisation. This finding strengthens the hypothesis that this organisation was likely present in the interactions of our last common ancestor before the evolution of language, bridging the gap between human and animal communication.
URL:	https://doi.org/10.48693/590 https://osnadocs.ub.uni-osnabrueck.de/handle/ds-2024101511663
Subject Keywords:	Turn-taking; Chimpanzees; Development; Comparative cognition
Issue Date:	15-Oct-2024
License name:	Attribution 3.0 Germany
License url:	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/de/
Type of publication:	Dissertation oder Habilitation [doctoralThesis]
Appears in Collections:	FB08 - E-Dissertationen

This item is licensed under a Creative Commons License