H2020Индивидуална стипендия2017–2019

THE VERBAL APE · The primate precursors of human consonants and vowels

„Хоризонт 2020“ — Действия „Мария Склодовска-Кюри“

Период: 2017-04-01 → 2019-03-31
Финансиране от ЕС: 195 455 €
Участници: 1
Схема: MSCA-IF-EF-ST

Линиите свързват координатора с партньорите.

Накратко на български

Звуковите комбинации при големите маймуни се сравняват със съгласните и гласните в човешката реч. Това помага да се разбере как е еволюзирал езикът и дали нашите предци са притежавали подобни способности за комуникация.

Този кратък обзор е генериран от изкуствен интелект

Кратко обяснение, генерирано от езиков модел по текста на CORDIS. Оригиналът е по-долу.

Резултати накратко

The primate precursors of human consonants and vowels

Speech is a human diagnosing feature but its evolution is problematic. Critically, while speech is essentially learned anew each generation, great apes – our closest relatives – are presumed incapable of learning to produce new calls. Recurring to large data analyses of great ape vocal recordings, playback field experiments in great ape territory and experimental test with great ape captivities, this project sought to resolve the seeming disparity between great ape and human vocal capacities, and by extension, the seeming lack of evolutionary continuity between a putative ancestral ape-like vocal system and human language. This project unveiled that great ape consonant-vowel–like call combinations behave, vary and evolve as human syllables, indicating that both combinatorial system are structurally homologous and therefore giving support to the view that early forms of proto-language and proto-linguistics could have emerged within the human clade, from which fully fledge language as used today may have stemmed. This project determined that the communication channel (between two communicating great apes) as a source of ecological noise does not drive the combinatorial marriage between consonant-like with vowel-like calls, and by extension, most likely did not do so either between the first-linguistic human ancestors. Moreover, the project demonstrated that, contra orthodox ideas, great apes exert motor control over their voice (i.e. vocal fold oscillation action), their supralaryngeal articulators (i.e. lips, tongue and jaw) and their breathing musculatures (i.e. diaphragm, abdominal and intercostal muscles) sufficient to allow them to both invented and learn new calls, and consequently, increase their vocal repertoire, something that our own direct hominid ancestors were therefore likely also capable of. Altogether, the project shows that humans’ first linguistic ancestors owned a constellation of structural and motor traits upon which language evolution could have piggybacked. Doing so, this project demonstrates that great apes still have much to say about the origin and evolution of human language.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз

Цел на проекта

Speech is a human diagnosing feature but its evolution is problematic. While great apes – our closest relatives – seem incapable of learning to produce new calls, speech is essentially learned anew each generation. Based on the largest call database ever assembled from of any great ape (namely, orangutans) and pioneering empirical tests to be conducted in the wild and captivity, this project envisions addressing the puzzle of speech evolution conclusively. Namely, this project will assess the hypothesis that human consonants and vowels stem from articulatory and acoustic homologues present in great apes – voiceless and voiced calls, respectively. Objective 1 will investigate whether great ape voiceless and voiced calls exhibit different evolutionary trajectories and rates as observed between consonant and vowels in humans. Objective 2 will analyze, via playback experiments in great ape territory, how the evolutionary ecology of human paleoforms affected the use of consonant-like voiceless calls and vowel-like voiced calls, potentially explaining why these two basis linguistic elements started to be combined for the first time in our lineage. Objective 3 is set up to uncover, via human-ape match tests in captivity, the precise range of articulatory control that great apes exert over vocal production, ultimately indicating the sounds that constituted the first words to be uttered by early human ancestors. Altogether, this project brings a new basal pillar into the theoretic edifice of speech evolution and brings the topic back to the forefront of European and worldwide scientific inquiry. The project has gathered the best hosting conditions conceivable within the field of primate cognition research and is to be conducted in the prestigious School of Psychology and Neuroscience of University of St. Andrews, UK, and to be co-supervised by the prominent and prolific authors Prof. Josep Call and Prof. Klaus Zuberbühler.

Оригинален текст от CORDIS (на английски).

Участници

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