Monkeys’ vocal equipment can produce the sounds of human speech, research shows, but they lack the connections between the auditory and motor parts of the brain that humans rely on to imitate words. Brian Jefferey Beggerly/Flickr hide caption
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Brian Jefferey Beggerly/Flickr
Brian Jefferey Beggerly/Flickr
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.
Enlarge this imageThe researchers used X-ray videos to capture and trace the movements of the different parts of a macaque’s vocal anatomy — such as the tongue, lips and larynx — during a number of typical macaque behaviors, including lip-smacking, yawning, grunting and cooing. Courtesy of Asif Ghazanfar/Princeton Neuroscience Institute hide caption
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Courtesy of Asif Ghazanfar/Princeton Neuroscience Institute
Courtesy of Asif Ghazanfar/Princeton Neuroscience Institute
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.”
Monkey Voice Simulation Saying “Happy Holidays”
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