Cats distinguish between speech directed at them and humans

A small study has found that cats may change their behavior when they hear their owner's voice talking in a tone directed to them, the cats, but not when hearing the voice of a stranger or their owner's voice directed at ...

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 ...

Creating eco-friendly sound absorbers from seaweed

From airplanes to apartments, most spaces are now designed with sound-absorbing materials that help dampen the droning, echoing and murmuring sounds of everyday life. But most of the acoustic materials that can cancel out ...

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 ...

Can we perceive gender from children's voices?

The perception of gender in children's voices is of special interest to researchers, because voices of young boys and girls are very similar before the age of puberty. Adult male and female voices are often quite different ...

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 ...

To better understand speech, focus on who is talking

Seeing a person's face as we are talking to them greatly improves our ability to understand their speech. While previous studies indicate that the timing of words-to-mouth movements across the senses is critical to this audio-visual ...

Gorillas can tell human voices apart

Many animals recognize the voices of members of their own species, and some can even recognize those of other species, such as humans. But it turns out a few animals, such as gorillas, can not only recognize familiar voices ...

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 ...

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