Animal Grunts Are Structured Like Human Speech

Banded Mongoose University of Zurich

The evolution of speech is a complex story, but one key feature is we humans’ ability to form intricate sounds using vowels and consonants. Animals have simpler anatomy, so they can’t produce as many distinguishable sounds, instead combining their basic noises into more complicated patterns that become things like birdsong. But it turns out even the monosyllabic noises work like a sort of Morse code, with specific structures that contain different information.

Related Articles

	10 Animals That Are Smarter Than You Think
	Experiment: Look At Pictures Of Cute Baby Animals To Improve Your Concentration
	Talking to Dolphins: New "Dolphin Speaker" Produces Full Range of Dolphinese Sounds

Tags

Science, Rebecca Boyle, animal behavior, animal communication, animals, sound science, species

The first bit of screechy call works like an identifier, providing information about the animal making the racket. This is important for mongoose relationships, because the animals can recognize individuals based on this sound. The second, more tonal part of the call indicates what the animal is doing. Study coauthor David Jansen compared that second part to a vowel, and says it shows for the first time that mongoose, at least, make sounds in a way that bears some resemblance to the way we build words. The study appears in BMC Biology.

Animal behaviorists should start listening more closely to other seemingly monosyllabic creatures, they added--from bats to frogs and more. We have evidence that dogs and cats can talk, so of course this makes sense.

[via ScienceDaily]