Say, What? Monkey Mouths And Throats Are Equipped For Speech
Say, What? Monkey Mouths And Throats Are Equipped For Speech
By Nell Greenfield Boyce, NPR News, December 9 2016
Monkeys' vocal equipment can produce the sounds of human speech, research shows, but they lack the connections between the auditory and motor parts of the brain that humans rely on to imitate words. ( Brian Jefferey Beggerly/Flickr )
If you could change the way a monkey or an ape's brain is wired, that animal would be capable of producing perfectly intelligible speech.
That's the conclusion of a study that closely tracked the movements of a monkey's mouth and throat with X-rays, to understand the full potential of its vocal tract .
The researchers used X-ray videos to capture and trace the movements of the different parts of a macaque's vocal anatomy — such as the tongue, lips and larynx — during a number of typical macaque behaviors, including lip-smacking, yawning, grunting and cooing. ( Courtesy of Asif Ghazanfar/Princeton Neuroscience Institute )
The finding calls into question long-held assumptions about how humans developed their unique ability to use spoken language.
"What you'll find in the textbooks is that monkeys can't talk because they don't have the appropriate vocal tract to do so," says Tecumseh Fitch , a cognitive biologist at the University of Vienna. "That, I think, is a myth. My colleagues and I all get very tired of seeing this. But you see it in all the textbooks. Lots of popular books, and also scholarly books about the evolution of language, assume that in order to evolve speech we had to have massive changes in our vocal tract. "
In the past, scientists looked at dead animals to judge what their vocal tracts could do. But Fitch says that made people vastly underestimate the flexibility of nonhuman mammals.
He and his colleagues monitored a long-tailed macaque named Emiliano as he made a wide range of different gestures and sounds, including lip-smacks, yawns, chewing, coos and grunts. Their special equipment took a rapid series of X-rays that allowed them to capture the full range of movement in the monkey's vocal tract. Then they used computer models to explore its potential for generating speech.
Friday, in the journal Science Advances , his team reports that monkeys would be physically capable of producing five distinguishable vowels — the most common number of vowels found in the world's languages.
And human listeners could clearly understand phrases they created with their synthesized monkey speech, including a marriage proposal.
The bottom line, says Fitch, is that a monkey's speech limitations stem from the way its brain is organized.
"As soon as you had a brain that was ready to control the vocal tract," Fitch says, "the vocal tract of a monkey or nonhuman primate would be perfectly fine for producing lots and lots of words."
The real issue is that monkeys' brains do not have direct connections down to the neurons that control the larynx and the tongue, he says. What's more, monkeys don't have critical connections within the brain itself, between the auditory cortex and motor cortex, which makes them incapable of imitating what they hear in the way that humans do.
Rise of the Planet of the Apes , a science fiction movie from 2011, actually has the right idea , notes Fitch. In that film, after a lab chimp named Caesar undergoes brain changes, he eventually is able to speak words such as "No."
"The new Planet of the Apes is a pretty accurate representation of what we think is going on," says Fitch.
To hear simulated monkey voice saying “Happy Holidays” and “Will you
marry me?” click this link to go to the original NPR story:
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You mean I missed it? Thank heaven.
I wish they could talk... We need to hear their voice and how they feel about things.
"I like throwing poop."
Koko, the gorilla, comes up with some pretty profound stuff. She loved Robin williams immediately, and mourned his loss. I think she is very profound. I'm glad she's safe where she is.
"I like throwing poop."
So do some NT members - lately one in particular is aiming at me these days. LOL
How they feel about things ? In order to get there you need to be able to speak their language . For example , what is this critter saying ?
Petey, when my grandfather was a little boy, long about 110 years ago, he found a little fox that was unconscious from blood loss-- his foot had been caught in a trap and the end cut off. Grandpa wrapped him in his coat and took him home, where his mother dressed the wound, and they nursed him back to health. My great-grandfather, who was a shoe maker and a farmer, made him a tiny little shoe for his foot. When they let him go, he stayed around the farm the rest of his life, wore his little shoe until his foot was healed, and would sit with my grandfather under the Old Hickory Tree, with his head in Grandpa's lap.
Animals are capable are very human feelings. The fox must have felt safe with Grandpa, and loved him. The fox voluntarily kept visiting him, and Grandpa watched for him-- to see his fox friend.
I think that animals have a lot to say that is worth listening to. Maybe it would help us, as humans, to listen to them. They can't speak to us in the language we know-- although this little fellow seems like he is trying to speak-- but I do believe they have a language of their own.
Have you ever watched deer, when they don't know you're there? They speak to one another with their body language. A flick of a tail, the placement of their ears, a few, brief vocalizations-- they have a language all their own. Then, seemingly all at once, they startle when they realize you're there and off they go! A whirl of wind brings your scent to them, or maybe you've shifted your feet and the sound of a twig snap-- but they startle and RUN.
They could tell us so much, if we could just understand and listen to them...