Animal Vocal Communication
Assessment and Management Roles

This volume presents a new approach to conceptualizing animal vocal communication, with an emphasis on how receivers' responses influence signalling.

Eugene S. Morton (Author)

9781107052253, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 6 April 2017

260 pages, 49 b/w illus. 5 tables
25.3 x 17.8 x 1.7 cm, 0.67 kg

'[Morton] presents a serious discussion of how we should view the evolution and function of animal vocal communication. For anyone interested in this most compelling of all animal behaviors, this book is well worth the time and effort.' Michael Ryan, The Quarterly Review of Biology

How do animals communicate using sounds? How did animal vocal communication arise and evolve? Exploring a new way to conceptualize animal communication, this new edition moves beyond an earlier emphasis on the role of senders in managing receiver behaviour, to examine how receivers' responses influence signalling. It demonstrates the importance of the perceiver role in driving the evolution of communication, for instance in mimicry, and thus shifts the emphasis from a linguistic to a form/function approach to communication. Covering a wide range of animals from frogs to humans, this new edition includes new sections on human prosodic elements in speech, the vocal origins of smiles and laughter and deliberately irritating sounds and is ideal for researchers and students of animal behaviour and in fields such as sensory biology, neuroscience and evolutionary biology.

Preface
Introduction
1. The informationizing of communication
2. The roles of assessment and management in communication
3. Form and function in vocal communication
4. Mechanisms and proximate processes of vocal communication
5. Assessment/management: a viable replacement for the metaphor of transmitted information
References
Index.

Subject Areas: Animal ecology [PSVS], Animal behaviour [PSVP], Neurosciences [PSAN], Evolution [PSAJ], Biology, life sciences [PS]