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Abstract

Language, humans’ most distinctive trait, still remains a ‘mystery’ for
evolutionary theory. It is underpinned by a universal infrastructure—
cooperative turn-taking—which has been suggested as an ancient mechanism
bridging the existing gap between the articulate human species and their
inarticulate primate cousins. However, we know remarkably little about
turn-taking systems of non-human animals, and methodological confounds
have often prevented meaningful cross-species comparisons. Thus, the
extent to which cooperative turn-taking is uniquely human or represents a
homologous and/or analogous trait is currently unknown. The present
paper draws attention to this promising research avenue by providing an over-
view of the state of the art of turn-taking in four animal taxa—birds, mammals,
insects and anurans. It concludes with a new comparative framework to spur
more research into this research domain and to test which elements of the
human turn-taking system are shared across species and taxa.