Browsing by Author "Fagot, Joel"

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    Evidence of a Vocalic Proto-System in the Baboon (Papio papio) Suggests Pre-Hominin Speech Precursors
    (PLOS, 2017) Boe, Louis-Jean; Berthommier, Frederic; Legou, Thierry; Captier, Guillaume; Kemp, Caralyn; Sawallis, Thomas R.; Becker, Yannick; Rey, Arnaud; Fagot, Joel; UDICE-French Research Universities; Communaute Universite Grenoble Alpes; Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble; Universite Grenoble Alpes (UGA); Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS); Aix-Marseille Universite; Universite de Montpellier; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
    Language is a distinguishing characteristic of our species, and the course of its evolution is one of the hardest problems in science. It has long been generally considered that human speech requires a low larynx, and that the high larynx of nonhuman primates should preclude their producing the vowel systems universally found in human language. Examining the vocalizations through acoustic analyses, tongue anatomy, and modeling of acoustic potential, we found that baboons (Papio papio) produce sounds sharing the F1/F2 formant structure of the human [i o a e u] vowels, and that similarly with humans those vocalic qualities are organized as a system on two acoustic-anatomic axes. This confirms that hominoids can produce contrasting vowel qualities despite a high larynx. It suggests that spoken languages evolved from ancient articulatory skills already present in our last common ancestor with Cercopithecoidea, about 25 MYA.
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    Which way to the dawn of speech?: Reanalyzing half a century of debates and data in light of speech science
    (American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2019) Boe, Louis-Jean; Sawallis, Thomas R.; Fagot, Joel; Badin, Pierre; Barbier, Guillaume; Captier, Guillaume; Menard, Lucie; Heim, Jean-Louis; Schwartz, Jean-Luc; UDICE-French Research Universities; Communaute Universite Grenoble Alpes; Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble; Universite Grenoble Alpes (UGA); Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS); University of Alabama Tuscaloosa; Aix-Marseille Universite; Universite de Montreal; University of Quebec; University of Quebec Montreal; Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle (MNHN)
    Recent articles on primate articulatory abilities are revolutionary regarding speech emergence, a crucial aspect of language evolution, by revealing a human-like system of proto-vowels in nonhuman primates and implicitly throughout our hominid ancestry. This article presents both a schematic history and the state of the art in primate vocalization research and its importance for speech emergence. Recent speech research advances allowmore incisive comparison of phylogeny and ontogeny and also an illuminating reinterpretation of vintage primate vocalization data. This review produces three major findings. First, even among primates, laryngeal descent is not uniquely human. Second, laryngeal descent is not required to produce contrasting formant patterns in vocalizations. Third, living nonhuman primates produce vocalizations with contrasting formant patterns. Thus, evidence now overwhelmingly refutes the long-standing laryngeal descent theory, which pushes back "the dawn of speech" beyond similar to 200 ka ago to over similar to 20 Ma ago, a difference of two orders of magnitude.