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 ...

Baby seals can change their tone of voice

Hoover the "talking seal" famously imitated human speech. But can baby seals already adapt their voices to sounds? Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Free University of Brussels ...

A new perspective on the genomes of archaic humans

A genome by itself is like a recipe without a chef—full of important information, but in need of interpretation. So, even though we have sequenced genomes of our nearest extinct relatives—the Neanderthals and the Denisovans—there ...

How do horses read human emotional cues?

Scientists have demonstrated for the first time that horses integrate human facial expressions and voice tones to perceive human emotion, regardless of whether the person is familiar or not.

Study reveals human ability to make ourselves sound bigger

Research from the University of Sussex suggests that humans are unique among primates in being able to intentionally alter the frequencies of our voices to sound larger or smaller than we really are, a capacity that is likely ...

Rare primate's vocal lip-smacks share features of human speech

The vocal lip-smacks that geladas use in friendly encounters have surprising similarities to human speech, according to a study reported in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on April 8th. The geladas, which live only ...

An elephant that speaks Korean (w/ Video)

An Asian elephant named Koshik can imitate human speech, speaking words in Korean that can be readily understood by those who know the language. The elephant accomplishes this in a most unusual way: he vocalizes with his ...

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