Monkey studies reveal possible origin of human speech

July 23, 2018, Rockefeller University

Most animals, including our primate cousins, communicate: they gesture, grimace, grunt, and sing. As a rule, however, they do not speak. So how, exactly, did humans acquire their unique talent for verbal discourse? And how do our brains manage this complex bit of communicative magic?

Scientists in the lab of Winrich Freiwald have shed new light on the underpinnings of human speech by identifying neural circuitry in the brains of monkeys that could represent a common evolutionary origin for social communication. As reported in the journal Neuron, these circuits are involved in face recognition, facial expression, and emotion. And they may very well have given rise to our singular capacity for speech.

Body Language

Working with rhesus macaque monkeys, Freiwald had previously identified neural networks responsible for recognizing faces—networks that closely resemble ones found in the human brain.

Other researchers, meanwhile, had suggested that particular areas of the brain might be responsible for producing facial expressions. But no one had imaged these facial motor regions while they were active, much less when they were being used for communication. Nor did scientists understand how these networks might interact with each other and with areas of the brain that handle emotion, another integral component of social interaction.

Continued 

Dogs understand both vocabulary and intonation of human speech

Date: August 29, 2016

Source: American Association for the Advancement of Science

Dogs have the ability to distinguish vocabulary words and the intonation of human speech through brain regions similar to those that humans use, a new study reports.

Attila Andics et al. note that vocabulary learning "does not appear to be a uniquely human capacity that follows from the emergence of language, but rather a more ancient function that can be exploited to link arbitrary sound sequences to meanings."

Words are the basic building blocks of human languages, but they are hardly ever found in nonhuman vocal communications. Intonation is another way that information is conveyed through speech, where, for example, praises tend to be conveyed with higher and more varying pitch. Humans understand speech through both vocabulary and intonation.

Here, Andics and colleagues explored whether dogs also depend on both mechanisms. Dogs were exposed to recordings of their trainers' voices as the trainers spoke to them using multiple combinations of vocabulary and intonation, in both praising and neutral ways.

For example, trainers spoke praise words with a praising intonation, praise words with a neutral intonation, neutral words with a praising intonation, and neutral words with neutral intonation.

Researchers used fMRI to analyze the dogs' brain activity as the animals listened to each combination. Their results reveal that, regardless of intonation, dogs process vocabulary, recognizing each word as distinct, and further, that they do so in a way similar to humans, using the left hemisphere of the brain.

Continue reading 

Voice control in orangutan gives clues to early human speech

July 27, 2016

An adolescent orangutan called Rocky could provide the key to understanding how speech in humans evolved from the time of the ancestral great apes, according to new research.

In an imitation "do-as-I-do" game, eleven-year-old Rocky, who was eight at the time of the research, was able to copy the pitch and tone of sounds made by researchers to make vowel-like calls.

The discovery, led by Dr Adriano Lameira of Durham University, UK, shows that orangutans could have the ability to control their voices.

It might answer the argument about whether or not spoken language stemmed from early human ancestors.

Previously it was thought that great apes - our closest relatives - could not learn to produce new sounds and because speech is a learned behaviour it could not have originated from them.

The findings are published today (Wednesday, July 27) in the journal Scientific Reports.

Rocky was studied at Indianapolis Zoo, Indiana, USA, where he is currently housed, between April and May 2012, and all steps were taken to ensure his routine and environment were not disrupted.

During the study, a researcher made random sounds with variations in the tone or pitch of her voice which Rocky then mimicked.

The research team compared these sounds against the largest available database of orangutan calls collected from over 12,000 hours of observations of more than 120 orangutans from 15 wild and captive populations.

They were able to conclude that the sounds made by Rocky were different compared to the sounds on the database, showing that he was able to learn new sounds and control the action of his voice in a "conversational" context.

Dr Lameira, who was not a member of Durham University staff at the time of the research but joined the Department of Anthropology in 2015, said: "It's not clear how spoken language evolved from the communication systems of the ancestral great apes.

Read more at: 

Do Dogs Understand Words or Emotions?

by Tia Ghose, Staff Writer | November 26, 2014 12:00pm ET

Come boy! Off the couch! Aww, who's my widdle fur baby?

It's an age-old debate: Do dogs understand the words their owners say to them, or are they just cuing in to the tone of voice?

It turns out it may be both: Man's best friend not only hears the meaning of human speech, but also perceives the emotion behind it, new research finds.

Although the new findings don't prove that dogs fully understand all of the emotional aspects of human speech, they do show that dogs are at least paying attention to it, said study co-author Victoria Ratcliffe, a doctoral candidate in psychology at the University of Sussex in England.

read on ...

Banded Mongooses Structure Monosyllabic Sounds in a Similar Way to Humans

Jan. 10, 2013 — Animals are more eloquent than previously assumed. Even the monosyllabic call of the banded mongoose is structured and thus comparable with the vowel and consonant system of human speech. Behavioral biologists from the University of Zurich have thus become the first to demonstrate that animals communicate with even smaller sound units than syllables.

When humans speak, they structure individual syllables with the aid of vowels and consonants. Due to their anatomy, animals can only produce a limited number of distinguishable sounds and calls. Complex animal sound expressions such as whale and bird songs are formed because smaller sound units -- so-called "syllables" or "phonocodes" -- are repeatedly combined into new arrangements. However, it was previously assumed that monosyllabic sound expressions such as contact or alarm calls do not have any combinational structures. Behavioral biologist Marta Manser and her doctoral student David Jansen from the University of Zurich have now proved that the monosyllabic calls of banded mongooses are structured and contain different information. They thus demonstrate for the first time that animals also have a sound expression structure that bears a certain similarity to the vowel and consonant system of human speech.

Read on:  http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/01/130110075356.htm

Monkey Lip Smacks Provide New Insights Into the Evolution of Human Speech

ScienceDaily (May 31, 2012) — Scientists have traditionally sought the evolutionary origins of human speech in primate vocalizations, such as monkey coos or chimpanzee hoots. But unlike these primate calls, human speech is produced using rapid, controlled movements of the tongue, lips and jaw. Speech is also learned, while primate vocalizations are mostly innately structured. New research published in Current Biology by W. Tecumseh Fitch, Head of the Department of Cognitive Biology at the University of Vienna, supports the idea that human speech evolved less from vocalizations than from communicative facial gestures.

Researchers at Princeton and the University of Vienna used x-ray movies to investigate lip-smacking gestures in macaque monkeys. Lip smacks are made by many monkey species in friendly, face-to-face situations (e.g. between mothers and their infants). Although lip-smacking makes a quiet sound (similar to "p p p p"), it is not accompanied by phonation, which is produced by vocal cord vibration in the "voice box" or larynx.

Although superficially lip-smacking appears to involve simply rapid opening and closing of the lips, the x-ray movies show that lip-smacking is actually a complex behaviour, requiring rapid, coordinated movements of the lips, jaw, tongue and the hyoid bone (which provides the supporting skeleton for the larynx and tongue). Furthermore these movements occur at a rate of about 5 cycles per second, the same as speech, and are much faster than chewing movements (about 2.5 cycles per second). Thus, although lip smacking superficially resembles "fake chewing," it is in fact very different, and more like speech.

Continued:  http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/05/120531135641.htm