Chimps share humans’ ‘snappy’ conversational style
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 took seven milliseconds to respond while Danish speakers took about 470 milliseconds to intervene.
By examining thousands of instances of wild chimpanzees communicating with each other, Prof Hobaiter and her colleagues were able to time the animals’ conversations.
“It’s amazing to see how close the chimpanzee and human timings were,” she said.
Chimps had a bigger range in their conversational timings. “The gaps ranged from interrupting the signaller 1,600 milliseconds before they finished their gesture, to taking 8,600 milliseconds to respond,” explained Prof Hobaiter.
“This could be because the chimps were in a natural setting, so they could express a wider range of behaviour – sometimes interrupting each other and other times taking a long time to respond.”
