Speech, Music & Hearing, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Lindstedtsvägen 24, 118 28, Stockholm, Sweden.
Department of Psychology, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK.
Sci Rep. 2024 Jul 25;14(1):17135. doi: 10.1038/s41598-024-67005-w.
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.
非人类的大型猿类据称由于缺乏必要的神经回路而无法学习人类的单词。我们恢复了两只受过文化熏陶的黑猩猩说出“妈妈”一词的原始镜头，并对录音进行了语音分析。我们的分析表明，黑猩猩能够发出音节，通过同时招募和耦合声音、下巴和嘴唇来实现辅音到元音的语音对比。在一个在线实验中，对录音来源一无所知的人类听众可靠地将黑猩猩的发音感知为音节发音，主要是作为“ma-ma”，而不是其他音节。我们的研究结果表明，在没有直接数据驱动的检查的情况下，对大型猿类的发声能力的估计过低。黑猩猩拥有说话所必需的神经结构。
