PDF(Pubmed)
Abstract：
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.
摘要：
由于缺乏必要的神经电路，非人类类人猿被声称无法学习人类单词。我们恢复了两只成年黑猩猩说出“妈妈”这个词的原始镜头，并对录音进行了语音分析。我们的分析表明黑猩猩能够产生音节，通过语音的同时招募和耦合实现辅音到元音的语音对比，下巴和嘴唇.在一个在线实验中，人类听众对录音的起源天真可靠地将黑猩猩的话语感知为音节话语，主要是“ma-ma”，在衬托音节之间。我们的研究结果表明，在没有直接数据驱动检查的情况下，巨大的猿声乐生产能力被低估了。黑猩猩拥有言语所必需的神经构件。
