Baboon speech talents get a hearing at last

摘要

Baboon grunts and barks have more in common with human speech than we thought. The monkeys routinely produce five of the distinct vowel sounds found in our languages. Researchers typically link our ability to produce a range of vowels with the low position of the human voice box, or larynx, in the throat. Non-human primates have a high larynx, hence are incapable of producing many vowel-like sounds.