Primate Vocalizations and Human Linguistic Ability

Nonhuman primate vocalizations support categorization in very young human infants.

Language is a signature of our species and our primary conduit for conveying the contents of our minds. The power of language derives not only from the exquisite detail of the signal itself but also from its intricate link to human cognition. To acquire a language, infants must identify which signals are part of their language and discover how these signals are linked to meaning. At birth, infa...

Flexible usage and social function in primate vocalizations.

Vocalizations are a pervasive feature of nonhuman primate social life, yet we know surprisingly little about their function. We review studies supporting the hypothesis that many primate vocalizations function to facilitate social interactions by reducing uncertainty about the signaler's intentions and likely behavior. Such interactions help to establish and maintain the social bonds that incre...

Prefrontal Responses to Vocalizations Neural Representation of Vocalizations in the Primate Ventrolateral Prefrontal Cortex

Discrimination of Linguistic and Non-Linguistic Vocalizations in Spontaneous Speech: Intra- and Inter-Corpus Perspectives

We present a large-scale study on classification of linguistic and non-linguistic vocalizations including laughter, vocal noise, hesitation and consent on four corpora amounting to 46 h of spontaneous conversational speech. We consider training and testing on speaker-independent subsets of single corpora (intracorpus) as well as inter-corpus experiments where models built on one or more corpora...

Neural representation of vocalizations in the primate ventrolateral prefrontal cortex.

In this study, we examined the role of the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex in encoding communication stimuli. Specifically, we recorded single-unit responses from the ventrolateral prefrontal cortext (vlPFC) in awake behaving rhesus macaques in response to species-specific vocalizations. We determined the selectivity of vlPFC cells for 10 types of rhesus vocalizations and also asked what types ...