Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

It would be extraordinarily difficult at present to conduct experiments that fairly compared a primate’s ability to a human’s, fully testing the null hypothesis.

These findings must be qualified by the fact that human speech perception necessarily reflects the effects of experience listening to a specific language, and it is difficult to equate such experience between humans and other animals.

Nonetheless, if findings of similarities between humans and animals trained on human speech contrasts are taken as evidence that primate audition is a sufficient basis for human speech perception, findings of differences following such training must be taken as weakening such a conclusion.

Speech production Turning to the articulatory side of speech, HCF cite two arguments against evolutionary adaptation for language in the human lineage.

One is that some birds and primates produce formants (time-varying acoustic energy bands) in their vocalizations by manipulating the supralaryngeal vocal tract, a talent formerly thought to be uniquely human.

Nonetheless, by all accounts such manipulations represent a minuscule fraction of the intricate gestures of lips, velum, larynx, and tip, body, and root of the tongue executed by speakers of all human languages (Browman & Goldstein, 1992; Hauser, 1996).

Non-human primates are also notoriously resistant to training of their vocalizations (Hauser, 1996), and as HCF R.

HCF try to downplay the difference between humans and primates by pointing out that vocal imitation is not uniquely human.

But this is irrelevant to the question of whether vocal imitation evolved for language in the human lineage.

The other species that evolved comparable talents, namely certain birds and porpoises, are not ancestral to humans, and must have evolved their talents independently of what took place in human evolution.