Overview

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.

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9781107052253

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Reviews

'[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

Author Information

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.

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