معرفی
Chiara Zulberti is a Researcher at the University of Leipzig, working within the Human Biology and Primate Cognition group. Her research explores chimpanzee communication systems to uncover the evolutionary origins of human language through analysis of non-human animal signaling structures.
Her educational background includes a Master's thesis on multimodal communication in wild chimpanzees completed at the University of Zurich between October 2021 and December 2022, conducted in collaboration with Joseph Mine, Gal Badihi, and Prof. Dr. Simon Townsend. Earlier, from October to November 2021, she served as a research assistant for data collection in captive bonobos at the Ape Cognition and Conversation Initiative under Dr. Maël Leroux.
Chiara's research focuses on primate communication, language evolution, cognitive mechanisms of communication, multimodal signaling, and combinatorial structures in animal communication. Her doctoral work specifically investigates whether chimpanzee signals exhibit combinatorial organization—a core feature of human language—to identify evolutionary pathways that led to language development. Key questions driving her research include whether humans and chimpanzees share fundamental communicative abilities and what cognitive mechanisms and selective pressures enabled language evolution.
She is based at the Institute Building (Talstraße 33, Room 220, 04103 Leipzig) and contributes to the Human Biology and Primate Cognition group's mission of studying non-human primate communication systems through field and experimental research.
