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Monkeys, despite their many biological similarities with humans, lack our capacity for speech. Now, a new study demonstrates that the macaques are anatomically able to produce all of the sounds needed for human speech, suggesting that the human brain, not the human vocal system, is responsible for our species’ unique ability to speak. Their research was published last week (December 9) in Science Advances.
“Now nobody can say that it’s something about the vocal anatomy that keeps monkeys from being able to speak,” said Asif Ghazanfar, coauthor on the study and professor of psychology at Princeton University, in a press release. Instead, “it has to be something in the brain” that restricts monkey speech to guttural noises.
Ghazanfar and his colleagues recorded X-ray video of ...
