Image source, Adrian Soldati
Like humans, wild chimpanzees engage in snappy, turn-taking conversations, where they wait just a fraction of a second for their turn to ‘speak’.
The animals communicate mostly with gestures including hand movements and facial expressions.
Scientists who studied their chats in detail found that they took “fast-paced turns” when they exchanged information and also occasionally interrupted one another.
The revelation suggests “deep evolutionary similarities [with humans] in how face-to-face conversations are structured,” Prof Cat Hobaiter from the University of St Andrews told BBC News.
This fast turn-taking is a hallmark of human conversation, explained Prof Hobaiter, who studies primate communication. “We all take around 200 milliseconds between turns and show some interesting small cultural variations. Some cultures are ‘fast talkers’.”
A millisecond is a thousandth of a second.
One 2009 linguistics study timed these differences – showing that, on average, Japanese speakers…
