Related topics: brain · current biology

Orangutan communication sheds light on human speech origins

New research from The University of Warwick has revealed that orangutans, the most arboreal of the great apes, produce consonant-like calls more often and of greater variety than their African ground-dwelling cousins (gorillas, ...

Ancient grammatical puzzle solved after 2,500 years

A grammatical problem that has defeated Sanskrit scholars since the 5th century BC has finally been solved by an Indian Ph.D. student at the University of Cambridge. Rishi Rajpopat made the breakthrough by decoding a rule ...

Captive lyrebirds lose their culture

A fortnight after five lions escaped at Sydney's Taronga Zoo, an amused zoo visitor captured footage of Echo the superb lyrebird as he mimicked alarm sirens and evacuation calls with astonishing accuracy.

Simplified voice box enriches human speech

An ongoing debate among scientists, on why chimpanzees and other nonhuman primates cannot speak or sing like humans, has focused mainly on evolutionary changes in human brain development. Attention has now expanded to anatomical ...

The case for speaking politely to animals

How we speak matters to animals. Horses, pigs and wild horses can distinguish between negative and positive sounds from their fellow species and near relatives, as well as from human speech, according to new research in behavioral ...

Study shows how people perceive gender through speech

Using terminology such as "female" and "male," or "feminine" and "masculine" affects how people perceive gender when hearing someone's voice, according to a study from researchers at the Acoustic Phonetics and Perception ...

Dog brains can distinguish between languages

Dog brains can detect speech and show different activity patterns to familiar and unfamiliar languages, according to a new brain imaging study by researchers from the Department of Ethology, Eötvös Loránd University (Hungary). ...

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