Dialogical Communicative Interaction between Humans and Elephants: an Experiment in Semiotic Alignment

Abstract

Theoretical and empirical contributions to the understanding of communicative interactions between heterospecifics are scarce and tend to apply a monological model of communication that focuses on the transfer of information from signallers to receivers. This study relies on an alternative model of communication, semiotic alignment, which sees communicative interaction as a dialogical process of joint semiosis resulting in the alignment of the interactants’ own-worlds (Umwelten). We conducted an experiment where dyads composed of an elephant instruction-giver and a human instruction-receiver needed to engage in dynamic and interactive communication in order to solve a cooperative object-choice task. Our results showed that dyads were able to solve the task well above chance levels. Moreover, cross-recurrence analysis revealed that interactants were synchronizing referential indexical gestures (pointing with a limb) throughout the experiment. However, we were not able to confirm a direct correlation between joint deixis and experimental outcomes, presumably because these outcomes are dependent on other forms of joint semiosis not analysed in this study.