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Vowel sounds made by baboons show that the roots of human speech may go back 25 million years
Amina Khan Contact Reporter
Jan 11, 2017; 1920hrs PST
Excerpts:
The findings, described in the journal PLOS One, could have significant implications for our understanding of human speech’s development and the emergence of language.
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Think about “cat,” “kit,” “cut,” “coat,” “coot,” “keet,” and “caught” – seven words with different meanings. Each has a “k” sound at the beginning and a “t” at the end, and are essentially differentiated in sound only by their vowels. Without each of those subtly distinguishable vowels, we wouldn’t be able to tell those words apart.
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Many scientists have thought that human speech may have evolved recently – within the last 100,000 years or so – partly because they figured that humans’ primate ancestors didn’t have vocal tracts that were physically capable of generating speech. But the new findings show that this assumption is not true: The ability to articulate vowel-like sounds, necessary for the development of human speech, was probably shared by the last common ancestor of both humans and baboons some 25 million years ago.
http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-baboons-speech-vowels-20170111-story.html
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