Which way to the dawn of speech? Reanalyzing half a century of debates and data in light of speech science

Louis-Jean Boë 1 Thomas R. Sawallis 2 Joël Fagot 3 Pierre Badin 4 Guillaume Barbier 1, 5 Guillaume Captier 6, 7 Lucie Ménard 8, 9 Jean-Louis Heim 10, 11 Jean-Luc Schwartz 1
1 GIPSA-PCMD - PCMD
GIPSA-DPC - Département Parole et Cognition, GIPSA-PPC - GIPSA Pôle Parole et Cognition
2 UA - University of Alabama [Tuscaloosa]
3 LPC - Laboratoire de psychologie cognitive
4 GIPSA-CRISSP - CRISSP
GIPSA-DPC - Département Parole et Cognition, GIPSA-PPC - GIPSA Pôle Parole et Cognition
5 School of Speech Pathology and Audiology
6 Laboratoire d'Anatomie
7 UM - Université de Montpellier
8 Laboratoire de Phonétique [Montréal]
9 Center For Research on Brain, Language, and Music
10 Musée de l'Homme
11 Institut de Paléontologie Humaine
Abstract : 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 longstanding laryngeal descent theory, which pushes back “the dawn of speech” beyond ~200 ka ago to over ~20 Ma ago, a difference of two orders of magnitude.
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Journal articles
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https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02304423
Contributor : Pierre Badin <>
Submitted on : Thursday, October 3, 2019 - 11:34:15 AM
Last modification on : Monday, January 13, 2020 - 11:05:10 AM

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Louis-Jean Boë, Thomas R. Sawallis, Joël Fagot, Pierre Badin, Guillaume Barbier, et al.. Which way to the dawn of speech? Reanalyzing half a century of debates and data in light of speech science. Science Advances , American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), 2019, Science Advances, 5 (12), pp.eaaw3916. ⟨10.1126/sciadv.aaw3916⟩. ⟨hal-02304423⟩

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