Dr. Franziska Wegdell

📢 Come to Tübingen and get your PhD with us! Unique opportunity to explore great ape communication 🐵🦧🦍 from multiple disciplinary angles within a single, integrated project. 👇

YouTube video by PeerJ Adapting the Facial Action Coding System for chimpanzees to bonobos

The spotlight video for the ChimpFACS Extension for bonobos is out: youtu.be/qijxWubdyNU?...

🐾 Just out & open access!
Exploring Animal Behavior Through Sound, Vol. 2 🎶
From insects to elephants and whales—how animals use & are affected by sound.
Thanks to Christiane Erbe & all co-authors (me included)!
👉 link.springer.com/book/10.1007...

Do you have field work experience? Do you want more? Our team wants YOU to manage our field site studying Kinda baboons in Kasanka National Park, Zambia!

Start date is this August 2025 so apply ASAP!

Job ad here: tinyurl.com/KindaBaboon

📢 2 PhD positions (E13 TV-L, 75%) in our DFG-funded project on great ape communication & the evolution of common ground!

🧠 Backgrounds in biology, psychology or linguistics welcome.
🗓️ Deadline: Aug 13
🔗 bit.ly/4l8p7hy & bit.ly/46jcfAq

Please share!
@elmanubohn.bsky.social @meanwhileina.bsky.social

The evolution of infant-directed communication: Comparing vocal input across all great apes Human infants receive more directed communication than other great ape infants, indicating that it evolved alongside language.

1/n Hot off the press!
The first empirical chapter of my PhD and the fruit of a hugely collaborative project led with Franziska Wegdell and Johanna Schick is out! We explore if immature-directed vocalisations are present and in what quantity in wild great apes.
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

📰 🐒 These exciting new results from our consortium are also featured in an article from The New York Times, by Carl Zimmer.

👉 www.nytimes.com/2025/06/25/s...

Did Baby Talk Give Rise to Language? The way that human adults talk to young children is unique among primates, a new study found. That might be one secret to our species’ grasp of language.

One thing that makes humans remarkable is baby talk. And that might be one reason why we have language. Here's my story [Gift link] nyti.ms/4k5duXd

Aaand we even made the cover! With beautiful Gloria, who is grooming her infant, Gwen, two bonobos of the Kokoalongo community at the Kokolopori Fieldsite in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

We are very thankful to our funders, especially the @nccrlanguage.bsky.social

In conclusion, our findings suggest that the tendency to direct vocalisations at infants has been massively expanded in the human lineage (after the split with bonobos and chimpanzees), potentially with language.

However, surrounding vocal communication - that is, communication not specifically directed at the infant - was present at broadly equivalent levels in chimpanzees, bonobos and humans.

We show that human infants receive dramatically more infant-directed vocal communication than non-human great ape infants.

To explore its evolution, we compared the amount of vocal communication that is directed at infants in both humans (from diverse cultural backgrounds) and wild non-human great apes (orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos). 🎙️👶🐵🦍🦧

a man is cleaning a stroller with the words goochy goochy goo written on the bottom ALT: a man is cleaning a stroller with the words goochy goochy goo written on the bottom

This research sheds light on a fundamental aspect of what makes us human: our capacity for language and how it is passed from one generation to the next. A key part of this process is infant-directed communication - communication directed to children.

with 14 authors in total: Lara Nellissen, Marion Laporte, Martin Surbeck, Maria van Noordwijk, Shelly Masi, Birgit Hellwig, Erik Willems, @zuberbuehler.bsky.social, Carel van Schaik, @sabinestoll.bsky.social and Simon Townsend

We studied the evolution of infant-directed communication by comparing vocal input rates across great apes!

A collaborative study led by @carolinefryns.bsky.social, Johanna Schick and me;

www.science.org/doi/epdf/10....

🌍 Dream of adventure in the heart of Africa? Boost your career in conservation or research as a field researcher on wild bonobos in the DRC! Paid, full training, project management skills & epic experience await.

Apply ASAP & RT to share! 👉 bit.ly/bondiv2025 #conservationjobs #research

Children Learn Best From Their Peers: The Crucial Role of Input From Other Children in Language Development

New paper on the role of peers in language acquisition: direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...

How cognitively demanding is the urban niche? Reconsidering exaptation and habituation - Animal Cognition Urbanization is hypothesized to create a myriad of cognitive challenges for animals because it creates novel environmental conditions in evolutionary terms. The consensus is that these novel urban cha...

Working with @wildcognition.bsky.social on this paper was so much fun: drawing from our research with mammals (primates & hyenas) we discuss to what extent the urban niche poses novel cognitive challenges or whether they are exapted to exploit urban resources
link.springer.com/article/10.1...

📢 Fully-funded PhD opportunity!

Explore the links between social & communication networks in ring-tailed lemurs!

Exciting fieldwork, interdisciplinary team, and innovative technologies! Apply now and join @primatenzentrum.bsky.social & @unigoettingen.bsky.social for this cutting-edge research!

Men Get More Patent Credit Than Women, Even For The Same Idea A new study finds that scientific papers authored by women are cited less often in patented inventions than those by men. Here's the reason and why it matters.

400 people w/ doctorates read the same research abstract where the lead authors name was either male or female. Participants felt the discovery in the abstract was more important when the author was male & spent more time reading it(114s for male authored; 98s female). www.forbes.com/sites/kimels...

Title of the new paper. Available here https://www.pt.ffri.hr/pt/article/view/1101

Many fields use video coding + interrater reliability. But: how reliable are those reliability tests?

No standards exist for sample size, clip choice, or metrics - a blind spot.

We present BRAVO—a first workflow to improve reliability by restricting coders DOF.

[Paper is OA]

#Reproducibility

Bonobo Sanctuary, Lola Ya Bonobo, is flooded. Financial help is needed to help them restore their facilities and keep the bonobos safe.

Extensive compositionality in the vocal system of bonobos Compositionality, the capacity to combine meaningful elements into larger meaningful structures, is a hallmark of human language. Compositionality can be trivial (the combination’s meaning is the sum ...

🚨New in @science.org🚨
With Simon Townsend (@nccrlanguage.bsky.social) and Martin Surbeck, we have investigated whether wild bonobos can combine calls in complex combinations, similar to how humans combine words into sentences 🧪
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

#ScienceResearch #AnimalCommunication

🌿 Become a Field Site Manager for the Moyen Bafing Chimpanzee Project in Guinea! 🌿 We're seeking a dedicated individual to oversee operations and support research starting as early as April 2025. Be part of a team exploring chimpanzee behavioral ecology in the stunning PNMB!

🚨 Preprint alert 🚨 – My first PhD paper is out as a preprint!

Need a break from everything happening in the world? Time to focus on #great #apes 🐵✨.

We investigated whether wild #bonobo infants develop more slowly than #chimpanzee infants, but the answer isn’t so clear-cut!