Posted on 12/09/2016 11:54:35 AM PST by BenLurkin
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.
Researchers then used that information to create a computer model of what it would sound like if the monkey were able to say phrases such as "happy holidays."
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.
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Common Core??
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http://www.seeker.com/monkeys-have-the-anatomy-to-talk-like-us-2138326412.html
http://phys.org/news/2016-12-monkeys-vocal-anatomy-problem.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/09/science/monkeys-speech.html?_r=0
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Typical NPR bullshit!
Humans’ mouths are shaped parabolically.
Parrot’s beaks are narrow without flexible lips, making speech essentially impossible.
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Do you consider a parrot’s squawks to be speech?
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Once they can talk they will definitely be given legal rights. So you can bet that PETA’s efforts will be directed to GMO monkey brains.
They should try it with a new born monkey. That is if they can pry it away from its birth mother without getting themselves beat to death. Start talking to it as though it was a newborn human.
it all went downhill when ceasar said “no”
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We could do some research (Hmmm Fed $$$$?)
You could volunteer to have your brain transplanted to a babboon...
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Agreed.
-PJ
Anyone who watched Planet of the Apes (the original, not the remake), would know that monkeys could talk.
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And anyone that has watched the Flintstones knows of their many modern conveniences...
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It’s a madhouse!
Decades ago, an experiment was conducted to teach a chimp to talk, and it was (sort of) a success. The chimp, after extensive training, was able to vocalize a few words (six, I think).
More recent experiments, such as those with Koko the gorilla, show that apes at least are more than capable of communicating complex information.
Monkeys are a more challenging situation, since their brains are smaller. If I’m understanding the article correctly, monkeys are missing several neural “connections” that would make speech possible, including between the brain and the larynx, and between certain areas of their brains (motor and auditory).
What would be more interesting is if this possibility carried over to species outside of primates. Elephants, for example, have shown that they’re capable of some pretty complex thinking, as well as communication. They’re missing the front incisors that we use for a lot of our consonants, but they do have pretty flexible mouths and tongues...
What would you do with my brain?
Just kidding!
They are quite capable of parroting human-like speech.
You asserted that a chimp, with a relatively identical vocal tract to a human's couldn't possibly ape human speech.
I merely gave an example, well known to most people, of human sounding speech coming from a vocal tract far, far different from a human's.
Do you want to double down and insist a chimp's lungs (bellows lungs like a human's, not flow through like a parrot's) larynx (single fold at the top of the trachea like a human's, not doubled and foldless like the syrinx located at the bottom of a parrot's trachea) flat tongue (like a human, not like a vermiform parrot's tongue) and lips (flexible like a humans, not a rigid beak like a parrot's) is utterly incapable of producing human-like speech sounds?
Leave it to an evolutionist to forget the basics....
Might as well claim people without teeth can’t possibly talk. Silly.
PLEASE don’t tell me that God actually designed the brains of monkeys and humans differently! And that is the reason monkeys don’t talk!
That will just be one more bomb in my foundation of believing in evolution!
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