Search

Comparative studies of animal communication systems are particularly important for understanding the origins and evolution of core features of human language like syntax and dialects. Recent studies have begun to develop bats as models for investigating shared traits with human language, given the complex social vocalizations of the former. Our previous research revealed that bat social calls contained almost 20 syllable types and the occurrence of these syllable types in the call sequences followed certain permutation rules. However, the differences in these patterns between populations remain unclear. Here, we examined the syntactic patterns of social calls in greater horseshoe bats, Rhinolophus ferrumequinum , from three geographically distant populations in China. The aggressive calls and behaviours during agonistic interactions of 26 bats were analysed to examine the consistency and variation between two aggression levels and across three populations. Common types of syllables, transitions and sequence patterns were found in all three populations. However, there were significant differences in the occurrence frequencies of shared syllable types, transition types and sequence types. Further, more noisy and composite syllables occurred when aggression was high than when it was low. There were also more transitions between noisy syllables and more repetitions in calls in a high aggression than in a low aggression context. The universal syntactic patterns and differences in social vocalizations of bats across different populations are of interest for fields of animal communication and language evolution. • Shared acoustic elements and patterns existed in social calls across populations. • Occurrence frequencies of vocalization types were different between populations. • High aggression calls were more noisy and complex than low aggression calls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]