The happy babbling that entertains parents as their babies try to mimic speech turns out to have a parallel in the animal world. Baby birds babble away before mastering their adult song, researchers report in Friday’s edition of the journal Science. …
Read the full article at AOL News
A new study may have been for (and about) the birds, but it also hints at how humans may have developed the ability to speak, potentially paving the way to one day to identifying the causes of speech deficiencies. …
Read the full news article at Scientific American
Researchers have found that monkeys combine calls to make them meaningful in the same way that humans do. It is hoped the St Andrews University study will provide fresh insights into the evolution of human language. …
Read the full news article at BBC News
Though they perch far apart on the avian family tree, birds with the ability to learn songs use similar brain structures to sing their tunes. Neurobiologists at Duke University Medical Center now have an explanation for this puzzling likeness. …
Read the full news article at Medical News Today
An area of the brain involved in the planning and production of spoken and signed language in humans plays a similar role in chimpanzee communication, researchers report. …
Read the full news article at Science Daily
A years-long study of apes performed by cognitive scientist Tomas Persson shows, among other things, that it doesn’t take a human brain to understand pictures as being a representation. Persson’s dissertation, which is now being submitted at Lund University, is the first one in Sweden to focus entirely on the thinking of apes. …
Read the full article at Alpha Galileo
Macaques may just seem to be indulging in monkey banter, but they can distinguish one another’s voices in much the same way that humans do, suggests a new study. …
Monkeys know one monkey voice from another
A mathematical competition between two rhesus macaques and fourteen undergraduates has revealed a new similarity between monkeys and college students: their ability to handle basic addition. …
Read the full news article at Nature News
A pair of researcher from the University of Alabama has shown that gerbils can be trained to recognise human vowel sounds. Joan Sinnott and Kelly Mosteller have found that gerbils can easily distinguish between vowels like an ‘oo’ (as in ‘you’) and an ‘ee’ (as in ‘me’). …
Read the full science news article at Yahoo! News India
Dolphins appear to change their vocalisations depending on their physical and social environments and level of human interaction, new research shows. …
Read the full news release at the University of Queensland science news room
Washoe, who has been called the first non-human to be able to attempt human-like communication with a set of signs, has passed away. The chimpanzee was 42.
National Geographic has more details of the chimp’s remarkable career. However, try your best not to mind their labelling her “the first nonhuman to acquire human language”. Believe me, I tried to find a news source that wouldn’t do that, but failed rather miserably.
You may not want a monkey to balance your chequebook, but you still have to give them credit – new research supports the idea that not only can monkeys understand written numbers, but that individual brain cells may become dedicated to specific numbers. …
Read the full news article at New Scientist
Or read the original research article: Semantic Associations between Signs and Numerical Categories in the Prefrontal Cortex
Bats are the most vocal mammals other than humans, and understanding how they communicate during their nocturnal outings could lead to better treatments for human speech disorders, say researchers at Texas A&M University. …
Read the full news article at Science Daily
Female rhesus monkeys use special vocalizations while interacting with infants, the way human adults use motherese, or “baby talk,” to engage babies’ attention, new research at the University of Chicago shows. “Motherese is a high pitched and musical form of speech, which may be biological in origin,” said Dario Maestripieri, Associate Professor in Comparative Human Development at the University. “The acoustic structure of particular monkey vocalizations called girneys may be adaptively designed to attract young infants and engage their attention, similar to how the acoustic structure of human motherese, or baby talk, allows adults to visually or socially engage with infants.” …
Read the full news article at EurekAlert
When orang-utans want a human to hand over a tasty treat, they use a similar strategy to that used in the game ‘charades’, say researchers. They repeat signals that work, and modify those that don’t, revealing surprisingly sophisticated communication skills. …
Read the full science article at Nature
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