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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
Eugene S. Morton is a Senior Scientist Emeritus at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC and an Adjunct Professor Emeritus at York University, Toronto. He specializes in migratory bird behavioural ecology, mating systems in birds and saturniid moths, animal communication and avian/plant coevolution. He received the William Brewster Award from the American Ornithologists' Union in 1995 for his ornithological research.
Reviews of the first edition:
"Packed full of cogent example, Donald Owings and Eugene Morton's Animal Vocal Communication is erudite, wide ranging and fascinating."
– New Scientist
"[...] interesting reading [...] an intellectual challenge [...] a most welcome contribution for readers with a good knowledge of the literature on animal vocal communication."
– Torben Dabelsteen, Ibis
"This is the shortest, most clearly written and most interesting of several major books on animal communication that were published in the past 3 years [...] This is a stimulating and provocative book [...] I highly recommend it to all primatologists interested in social behaviour and communication."
– International Journal of Primatology
