Abstract

Nonhuman great apes have been claimed to be unable to learn human words due to a lack of the necessary neural circuitry. We recovered original footage of two enculturated chimpanzees uttering the word “mama” and subjected recordings to phonetic analysis. Our analyses demonstrate that chimpanzees are capable of syllabic production, achieving consonant-to-vowel phonetic contrasts via the simultaneous recruitment and coupling of voice, jaw and lips. In an online experiment, human listeners naive to the recordings’ origins reliably perceived chimpanzee utterances as syllabic utterances, primarily as “ma-ma”, among foil syllables. Our findings demonstrate that in the absence of direct data-driven examination, great ape vocal production capacities have been underestimated. Chimpanzees possess the neural building blocks necessary for speech.

Details

Title
Chimpanzee utterances refute purported missing links for novel vocalizations and syllabic speech
Author
Ekström, Axel G. 1 ; Gannon, Charlotte 2 ; Edlund, Jens 1 ; Moran, Steven 3 ; Lameira, Adriano R. 2 

 KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Speech, Music & Hearing, Stockholm, Sweden (GRID:grid.5037.1) (ISNI:0000 0001 2158 1746) 
 University of Warwick, Department of Psychology, Coventry, UK (GRID:grid.7372.1) (ISNI:0000 0000 8809 1613) 
 University of Neuchâtel, Institute of Biology, Neuchâtel, Switzerland (GRID:grid.10711.36) (ISNI:0000 0001 2297 7718); University of Miami, Department of Anthropology, Coral Gables, USA (GRID:grid.26790.3a) (ISNI:0000 0004 1936 8606) 
Pages
17135
Publication year
2024
Publication date
2024
Publisher
Nature Publishing Group
e-ISSN
20452322
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
ProQuest document ID
3084593169
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2024. This work is published under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (the “License”). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.