A case study of conflict management in bonobos: how does a bonobo (Pan paniscus) mother manage conflicts between her sons and her female coalition partner?

Female coalitions are an important part of the social organization of bonobos. The strength of the mother-son relationship is another essential part of this social structure. A bonobo mother is therefore facing a dilemma when a conflict arises between her sons and her female coalition partners. Will she take her coalition partner's side and favour the social organization of the group or support her son in order to defend her offspring? In order to address this issue, we performed an observational study of the captive group at Planckendael (Belgium) and used social grooming and proximity to assess the relationship between individuals. As a case study, we focused on the relationships between Hortense, one of the group's mothers, her 3 sons Redi, Vifijo and Zamba, and her coalition partner Hermien. Surprisingly, we observed that Hortense preferentially supported her female coalition partner. For Hortense's social status in the group, it may be more important to maintain the strong relationship with her higher-ranking female coalition partner than to support her sons.

Conexión entre morfosintaxis y escritura: cuando la fonología es (casi) suficiente para escribir / Morphosyntax and spelling connection: When phonology is (almost) enough to spell

En este trabajo se analiza la posible influencia del conocimiento morfosintáctico en la escritura de un sistema ortográfico transparente como es el castellano. Se utiliza una clasificación que considera tres situaciones en las que el conocimiento gramatical puede influir en la escritura en sistemas opacos: a) decidir, utilizando la morfología, entre dos o más formas escritas compatibles con la fonologia; b) representar morfemas mudos y c) escribir morfemas que trasgreden las reglas de correspondencia fonemagrafema. Se observa que dos de las tres situaciones son aplicables en este sistema ortográfico, debido principalmente a la existencia de grafonemas inconsistentes y a las particularidades fonológicas del castellano hablado en diversas regiones. Se constata que la demostración de la conexión entre conocimiento gramatical y escritura está mayoritariamente por hacer y se propone un cuadro teórico en el cual podrían ser concebidos este tipo de estudios. El análisis de esta relación se inserta en un debate más general sobre la importancia del conocimiento léxico frenta al conocimiento de reglas y sobre la existencia de mecanismos generales de escritura frente a mecanismos contingentes, dependientes de la propia estructura del sistema ortográfico

This study analyses the possible influence of morphosyntactic knowledge on the spelling of a transparent orthographic system such as Spanish. A three situation classification where the grammatical knowledge could influence the spelling of opaque orthographic systems is used: a) deciding between two or more acceptable spelling sequences; b) spelling silent morphemes; c) conventional spellings for morphemes which flout letter-sound correspondence rules. It is observed that two out of three situations could be applied to Spanish, mainly due to the singularities of some Spanish region speakers and to the existence of inconsistent graphonemes. It is ascertained that there is almost not evidence about the connection between morphosyntactic knowledge and spelling. A theoretical frame for this kind of studies is provided. The analysis of this relationship concerns the lexical knowledge versus rule knowledge debate, and that of the general spelling mechanisms as opposed to contingent mechanisms that are dependent on the orthographic system structure itself