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 of the meaning of its parts) or nontrivial (one element modifies the meaning of the other element). Recent studies have suggested that animals lack nontrivial compositionality, representing a key discontinuity with language. In this work, using methods borrowed from distributional semantics, we investigated compositionality in wild bonobos and found that not only does each call type of their repertoire occur in at least one compositional combination, but three of these compositional combinations also exhibit nontrivial compositionality. These findings suggest that compositionality is a prominent feature of the bonobo vocal system, revealing stronger parallels with human language than previously thought.
I noticed the term "syllable" doesn't appear in the paper. If you use single utterances to convey things, and mostly are uttering across treetops far away to share things others aren't seeing directly (much less chatty when sitting together and everyone is sharing experience), then maybe when you run out of single noises that carry, you might make multi-part noises to mean single things. Is that composition?
Also, given the data, "prominent" (in abstract) seems to be overworking.
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 of the meaning of its parts) or nontrivial (one element modifies the meaning of the other element). Recent studies have suggested that animals lack nontrivial compositionality, representing a key discontinuity with language. In this work, using methods borrowed from distributional semantics, we investigated compositionality in wild bonobos and found that not only does each call type of their repertoire occur in at least one compositional combination, but three of these compositional combinations also exhibit nontrivial compositionality. These findings suggest that compositionality is a prominent feature of the bonobo vocal system, revealing stronger parallels with human language than previously thought.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adv1170
Also, given the data, "prominent" (in abstract) seems to be overworking.