Lingformant » Origins of language

Decoding the long calls of the orangutan

Vili Maunula — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 07:02:15 +0000

Research into the long calls of male Orangutans in Borneo has given scientists new insight into how these solitary apes communicate through dense jungle. An acoustic analysis of the calls, published today in Ethology, reveals that the calls not only serve to attract females, but also contain information on the identity and the context of the caller.

Full text: EurekAlert

Monkeys have a memory for grammar

Vili Maunula — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 09:22:42 +0000

Primates can intuitively recognise some rules of grammar, according to a study of cotton-topped tamarin monkeys (Saguinus oedipus). The findings do not mean primates can communicate using language, but they do suggest that some of the skills required to use language may be linked to very basic memory functions.

Full article: New Scientist

Evolutionary Origins of Your Right and Left Brain

Vili Maunula — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 12:57:50 +0000

The division of labor by the two cerebral hemispheres—once thought to be uniquely human—predates us by half a billion years. Speech, right-handedness, facial recognition and the processing of spatial relations can be traced to brain asymmetries in early vertebrates.

Full article: Scientific American

Why can we talk? ‘Humanized’ mice speak volumes

Vili Maunula — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 19:46:33 +0000

Mice carrying a “humanized version” of a gene believed to influence speech and language may not actually talk, but they nonetheless do have a lot to say about our evolutionary past, according to a report in the May 29th issue of the journal Cell, a Cell Press publication.

Full article: EurekAlert

Human speech gene gives mouse a baritone squeak

Vili Maunula — Sun, 31 May 2009 18:41:40 +0000

Mice can’t talk, but a transgenic rodent could shed light on the evolution of language. A team of German researchers has created mice with a human gene implicated in speech problems and thought to play a role in the evolution of language.

Full article: New Scientist

Monkey gossip hints at social origins of language

Vili Maunula — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 07:34:15 +0000

Women may be fed up with being stereotyped as the chattier sex, but the cliche turns out to be true – in female-centric monkey groups at least. The gossipy nature of female macaques also adds weight to the theory that human language evolved to forge social bonds.

Full article: New Scientist

Orangutan’s spontaneous whistling opens new chapter in study of evolution of speech

Vili Maunula — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 08:26:08 +0000

In a paper published this month in Primates, an international journal of primatology that provides a forum on all aspects of primates in relation to humans and other animals, Great Ape Trust scientist Dr. Serge Wich and his colleagues provide the first-ever documentation of a primate mimicking a sound from another species without being specifically trained to do so. Bonnie, a 30-year-old female orangutan living at the Smithsonian National Zoological Park in Washington, D.C., began whistling – a sound that is in a human’s, but not an orangutan’s, repertoire – after hearing an animal caretaker make the sound.

Full article: EurekAlert

Monkey gossip hints at social origins of language

Vili Maunula — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 22:08:05 +0000

Full article: New Scientist

Scientists hope parrots will teach humans the secrets of language

Vili Maunula — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 22:06:32 +0000

Scientists at a Scottish university are to analyse parrots, ravens and pigeons in a bid to discover how human language evolved, it was revealed yesterday.

Full article: scotsman.com

Gorilla study gives clues to human language development

Vili Maunula — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 07:40:14 +0000

A new University of Sussex study provides evidence that gorilla communication is linked to the left hemisphere of the brain – just as it is in humans.

Full article: Physorg

Monkey Brains Hint at Evolutionary Root of Language Processing

Vili Maunula — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 05:43:04 +0000

The use of vocalizations, such as grunts, songs or barks, is extremely common throughout the animal kingdom. Nevertheless, humans are the only species in which these vocalizations have attained the sophistication and communicative effectiveness of speech. How did our ancestors become the only speaking animals, some tens of thousands of years ago? Did this change happen abruptly, involving the sudden appearance of a new cerebral region or pattern of cerebral connections? Or did it happen through a more gradual evolutionary process, in which brain structures already present to some extent in other animals were put to a different and more complex use in the human brain?

A recent study in Nature Neuroscience yields critical new information, uncovering what could constitute the “missing link” between the brain of vocalizing nonhuman species and the human brain: evidence that a cerebral region specialized for processing voice, known to exist in the human brain, has a counterpart in the brain of rhesus macaques. …

Full article: Scientific American

Loud and Clear

Vili Maunula — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 20:52:52 +0000

Fossil finds suggest an early origin for human speech — It may be time to rethink the stereotype of grunting, wordless Neandertals. The prehistoric humans may have been quite chatty — at least if the ear canals of their ancestors are any indication. …

Full article: Science News

Neanderthals speak out after 30,000 years

Vili Maunula — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 07:26:05 +0000

Robert McCarthy, an anthropologist at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton has used new reconstructions of Neanderthal vocal tracts to simulate the voice. He says the ancient human’s speech lacked the “quantal vowel” sounds that underlie modern speech.

Read the full story from New Scientist

MIT: No easy answers in evolution of human language

Vili Maunula — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 14:22:29 +0000

The evolution of human speech was far more complex than is implied by some recent attempts to link it to a specific gene, says Robert Berwick, professor of computational linguistics at MIT. …

Read the full news article at EurekAlert

Cave Speak: Did Neandertals Talk?

Vili Maunula — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 11:25:54 +0000

German researchers have discovered Neandertals apparently had the human variant of a gene that is linked to speech and language. A team of scientists, primarily from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, made the discovery during efforts to reconstruct a full genome of the extinct hominid. …

Read the full news article at Scientific American