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Why Can't Monkeys Speak? Vocal Anatomy Is Not the Problem

Saturday, December 10, 2016 16:17

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The scientists used x-ray video to see within the mouth and throat of macaque monkeys induced to vocalize, eat food, or make facial expressions.

With their vocal tract, it would be easy for monkeys to produce many different language sounds.

Credit: Copyright: Tecumseh Fitch/University of Vienna

They then used these x-rays to build a computer model of a monkey vocal tract, allowing them to answer the question “what would monkey speech sound like, if a human brain were in control?” This showed that monkeys could easily produce many different sounds, enough to produce thousands of distinct words. Examples of synthesized monkey speech can be heard here:

The cognitive biologist Tecumseh Fitch has discovered that monkeys have the physiological conditions to speak.

Credit: Copyright: University of Vienna

This implies that a basic form of spoken language could have evolved at any time in human evolution, without requiring any changes in vocal anatomy.

Contacts and sources:
Univ.-Prof. Tecumseh Fitch
Department of Cognitive Biology
University of Vienna

Citation: W. T. Fitch, B. de Boer, N. Mathur, A. A. Ghazanfar, Monkey vocal tracts are speech ready.

Sci. Adv. 2, e1600723 (2016). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1600723 Publication in “Science Advances”:

Source: http://www.ineffableisland.com/2016/12/why-cant-monkeys-speak-vocal-anatomy-is.html

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