We all know that monkey has brains, but why they can't talk? A new study answers that question and suggests that monkeys may actually be able to talk, but aren’t able to do so intelligibly due to other reasons. Researchers from a university shows that monkey has vocal cords are designed for speech but their brains aren't.
The Reason Why Monkeys Can't Talk Like People
For decades, according to Science Mags, monkeys’ and apes’ vocal anatomy has been blamed for their inability to reproduce human speech sounds. But a new study suggests macaque monkeys could indeed talk if they only possessed the brain wiring to do so. The findings might provide new clues to anthropologists and language researchers looking to pin down when humans learned to speak. “This certainly shows that the macaque vocal tract is capable of a lot more than has previously been assumed,” says John Esling, a linguist and phonetics expert at the University of Victoria in Canada.
Macaques actually have vocal anatomy capable of human-like speech, according to a study published Friday in the journal Science Advances. "This suggests that what makes people unique among primates is our ability to control the vocal apparatus, not the apparatus itself," Thore Jon Bergman, an evolutionary biopsychologist at the University of Michigan who was not part of the research.
According to The Christian Science Monitor, researchers studying non-human primates had previously hypothesized that the shape, size, or structure of the vocal anatomy in the animals' heads might be holding them back from making the sorts of sounds that make up human speech. To test this idea, scientists decided to look at the vocal anatomy itself.
The Macaque Monkeys
The macaques constitute a genus (Macaca) of Old World monkeys of the subfamily Cercopithecinae. The 23 species of macaques are widespread over Earth. Macaques are principally frugivorous, although their diet also includes seeds, leaves, flowers, and tree bark, and some, such as the crab-eating macaque, persist on a diet of invertebrates and occasionally small vertebrates. All macaques' social groups are arranged around dominant, matriarchal females.
The conducted study provides "strong evidence to believe that macaque monkeys have a vocal tract capable of supporting a spoken language," Doctor Marcus Perlman, a cognitive scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands who was not involved in the research. “The range of different sounds that a living macaque can produce actually overlaps quite a bit with the sounds that a human can produce.”
