TY - JOUR
T1 - The evolution of speech
T2 - Vision, rhythm, cooperation
AU - Ghazanfar, Asif A.
AU - Takahashi, Daniel Y.
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank Diego Cordero, Lauren Kelly, and our two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments on this manuscript. We thank David Logue for information on, and insights into, duetting in songbirds. This work was supported by National Institutes of Health grant R01NS054898 (A.A.G.), a James S. McDonnell Scholar Award (A.A.G.), a Pew Latin American Fellowship (D.Y.T.), and a Brazilian Science without Borders Fellowship (D.Y.T.).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2014 Elsevier Ltd.
PY - 2014/10/1
Y1 - 2014/10/1
N2 - A full account of human speech evolution must consider its multisensory, rhythmic, and cooperative characteristics. Humans, apes, and monkeys recognize the correspondence between vocalizations and their associated facial postures, and gain behavioral benefits from them. Some monkey vocalizations even have a speech-like acoustic rhythmicity but lack the concomitant rhythmic facial motion that speech exhibits. We review data showing that rhythmic facial expressions such as lip-smacking may have been linked to vocal output to produce an ancestral form of rhythmic audiovisual speech. Finally, we argue that human vocal cooperation (turn-taking) may have arisen through a combination of volubility and prosociality, and provide comparative evidence from one species to support this hypothesis.
AB - A full account of human speech evolution must consider its multisensory, rhythmic, and cooperative characteristics. Humans, apes, and monkeys recognize the correspondence between vocalizations and their associated facial postures, and gain behavioral benefits from them. Some monkey vocalizations even have a speech-like acoustic rhythmicity but lack the concomitant rhythmic facial motion that speech exhibits. We review data showing that rhythmic facial expressions such as lip-smacking may have been linked to vocal output to produce an ancestral form of rhythmic audiovisual speech. Finally, we argue that human vocal cooperation (turn-taking) may have arisen through a combination of volubility and prosociality, and provide comparative evidence from one species to support this hypothesis.
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U2 - 10.1016/j.tics.2014.06.004
DO - 10.1016/j.tics.2014.06.004
M3 - Review article
C2 - 25048821
AN - SCOPUS:84908022874
SN - 1364-6613
VL - 18
SP - 543
EP - 553
JO - Trends in Cognitive Sciences
JF - Trends in Cognitive Sciences
IS - 10
ER -