Champ chimps

A study has found that like human beings, chimpanzees, too, can understand language 

If you believe speech perception is a uniquely human trait, think again —chimpanzees may also have the ability to understand language, says a new study.

The new research with a 25-year-old chimp named Panzee showed that the "well-educated" animal can understand more than 130 English words and can even recognise words in sine-wave form, a type of synthetic speech that reduces language to three whistle-like tones.

Researchers found that Panzee, the 25-year-old chimp, was able to understand more than 130 English words

This shows that she isn’t just responding to a particular person’s voice or emotions, but instead she is processing and perceiving speech as humans do, Discovery News reported.

"The results suggest that the common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans may have had the capability to perceive speech-like sounds before the evolution of speech, and that early humans were taking advantage of this latent ability when speech did eventually emerge," lead researcher Lisa Heimbauer, at Georgia State University’s Language Research Centre, said.

For their study, Heimbauer and colleagues tested Panzee on her ability to understand words communicated via sine-wave speech, which replicates the estimated frequency and amplitude patterns of natural utterances.

"Tickle," "M&M," "lemonade", and "sparkler" were just a few of the test words.

Even when the words were stripped of the acoustic constituents of natural speech, Panzee knew what they meant, correctly matching them to corresponding photos.

The findings, presented at the annual meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in San Diego, refute what is known as the "Speech is Special" theory.

"This argument proposes that besides humans being the only species able to produce speech, due to their anatomy, they also have a specialised cognitive module to process speech," Heimbauer explained. — PTI

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