[LINK] "From The Mouths Of Apes, Babble Hints At Origins of Human Speech"

[rfmcdonald]

NPR's Jon Hamilton reports on an orangutan's capacity for mimicry, suggesting that the human capacity for language goes back deep in evolutionary time in some form.

An orangutan named Tilda is providing scientists with fresh evidence that even early human ancestors had the ability to make speechlike vocalizations.

Tilda has learned to produce vocalizations with striking similarities to human speech, scientists report in the journal PLOS ONE. If you listen without knowing the source, "you might wonder whether or not it is a human," says Rob Shumaker, an author of the paper and vice president of the Indianapolis Zoo.

[. . .] Tilda learned to imitate people, says Adriano Lameira, the lead author of the paper and a founder of the Pongo Foundation, which studies orangutans and works to protect them.

[. . .]

"We were waiting for the whistles and suddenly she started to do these bizarre calls," Lameira says. It was unlike anything he'd ever heard from an orangutan, in the wild or in captivity. He says the rhythmic strings of consonants and vowels were like a cartoon approximation of a person speaking.

"She was producing these calls repeatedly and really quick," he says. "And this is also what we observe in humans while we are speaking to each other. We are, on average, producing five consonants and five vowels per second."

An analysis of Tilda's "faux speech" later showed she was matching that frequency precisely. "This was really what astonished us," Lameira says.