If you’ve ever taught collocations, idioms, or phrasal verbs, you know how meaning changes when we combine words. Surprisingly, chimpanzees might be doing something similar- with vocalisations.
In a major study published in Science Advances (Girard-Buttoz et al., 2025), researchers analysed over 4,000 vocal utterances from 53 wild chimpanzees in Côte d’Ivoire. Their goal? To test whether chimpanzees, like humans, use multiple combinatorial mechanisms to expand the meanings they can communicate.
We know that human language achieves its expressive power not through an infinite set of words, but through combining a finite set of elements in flexible ways- what Charles Hockett called dual patterning. But non-human animal communication? Traditionally it’s thought to be more rigid & limited. That assumption might now need revising.
The Study
The researchers focused on “bigrams” -two-call sequences- & analysed how these were used compared to their component calls. They used event distributions (i.e., what was happening during each call) & Euclidean distance models to detect patterns in meaning change. In other words, they tracked which calls occurred in which situations & how closely those patterns matched.
Their results? Chimpanzees didn’t just combine calls randomly. They used at least four distinct mechanisms to modify or expand meaning:
- New Meaning (Idiomatic): e.g. ‘hoo + pant’ calls used exclusively during nesting- an event where neither call is usually used.
- Clarification/Modification: e.g. ‘panted hoo + panted bark’ narrows or disambiguates meanings.
- Additive Meaning: where the combination retains both original meanings- similar to ‘alarm + recruit’ in birds (i.e., when birds call in order to say “come & help, there’s danger.”)
- Ordering Effects: the same two calls in different orders = different interpretations.
This versatility is unprecedented in animal communication. Previously, most species were thought to use only one mechanism, & usually in alarm contexts. But here, chimpanzees used multiple mechanisms across 22 daily life events, not just emergencies.
This supports Nowak et al.’s (2000) model of the evolution of language, which suggests combinatorial systems evolve when:
- individual signals are reused in many combinations, &
- combinations are used in diverse contexts.
Chimpanzees tick both boxes. And crucially, they appear to combine combinations, creating sequences of up to eight calls.
Teacher Takeaways?
While your students may not grunt or hoot to each other (well, not usually), this research raises fascinating parallels with human language learning:
- Teaching chunks matters. while chimpanzees use fixed combinations for distinct meanings (e.g., nesting), English has idiomatic expressions (‘kick the bucket’) that can’t be understood from parts alone.
- Word order counts. In English, ‘dog bites man’ ≠ ‘man bites dog’. The chimp study shows order also changes meaning in animal communication- supporting the idea that understanding syntax is central to communication.
- Context shapes interpretation. Just as a chimp’s grunt might mean one thing when grooming & another when feeding, our learners need exposure to vocabulary in multiple real-world contexts- not isolated from them.
Whether you’re teaching phrasal verbs or decoding idioms, it’s comforting to know that meaning-making through combinations isn’t just human- it might be evolutionary.
How do you help students connect language to context, so they can interpret meaning beyond individual words?
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