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Recent research counters a study  published earlier in 2015, that said chimpanzees can learn from the group how to speak local language.

Researchers from New York University (NYU), the German Primate Center in Göttingen, and the University of Kent examined the study more closely and decided that the study is not a good representation of the real information.

The earlier study was published in Current Biology, in which two sets of chimpanzees were probed at the Edinburgh Zoo. There was one group that was living in the zoo for a long time, while another group arrived from the Beekse Bergen Safari Park in the Netherlands.

When the two groups were studied for three years, scientists found that the second group had changed their vocalizations so that they could communicate with the natives regarding a common object---apples.

In the new analysis published in Current Biology, two defects were pointed out. Firstly, the reasons for the changing vocalizations and the overlooking of the similarity in the two groups' vocalizations suggests that the change was of low-scale significance.

"There are a number of problems with the original study," James Higham, an assistant professor in NYU's Department of Anthropology and a co-author of the new analysis, explained.

"Our first point relates to changes in arousal, which the authors did not control for and which could prompt false conclusions about the causes behind vocal changes," Julia Fischer, lead author of the new analysis from the German Primate Center, added. "The Dutch chimpanzees may have given slightly different calls to the Edinburgh chimps, and then changed their calls, due simply to differences in their original feeding environments and diet, and then the subsequent changes in these following their move to Edinburgh."

Hence, it was not the need for communication about apples that may have changed the second group, but the move from a different place. Hence, using a higher-pitched call when moving to the Edinburgh Zoo may represent the chimps' excitement, but not really a new way of communicating.

 Moreover, even the vocalizations were not totally different, says the study.

"Closer inspection of the data reveals that both groups largely overlapped in the range of calls they were originally giving in response to apples, with only a few calls of the Dutch chimpanzees outside the range of the calls given by the Edinburgh chimpanzees," Brandon Wheeler, co-author of the new analysis and a biological anthropologist at the University of Kent, said in the university's release. "There is some statistically significant but biologically weak change of the calls over time following the move of the Dutch chimpanzees to Edinburgh, but such social modulation is a well-known phenomenon in animal vocalizations that has been found in most primate calls--and even in the calls of goats."

Hence, there is still a lot of mystery in the entire science of learning and language.