Researchers propose new framework to compare human and nonhuman animal turn-taking skills empirically and to shed further light on the evolutionary roots of language

Cooperative turn-taking has been suggested as an ancient mechanism of the language system bridging the existing gap between the articulate human species and our inarticulate primate cousins. An international team of researchers, including Simone Pika from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Ray Wilkinson from the University of Sheffield, Kobin Kendrick from the University of York in the UK, and Sonja Vernes from the Max Planck Institute of Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands now provide an overview of the state of the art and present a new comparative framework on turn-taking to unravel the evolutionary roots of language.