Repeated imitation makes human vocalizations more word-like

Edmiston, Pierce; Perlman, Marcus; Lupyan, Gary

doi:10.1098/rspb.2017.2709

Cited by 15 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 48 publications

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“…Iterated learning experiments have been done to better understand linguistic morphology, poetry, and musical rhythm . − Iterated learning experiments where participants imitate and transmit nonsense syllable sequences could be used to show whether, and if so how, cultural transmission amplifies domain‐general biases resulting in rhythmic patterns of speech. This iterated learning approach can be integrated with neurophysiological measures .…”

Section: General Discussion and Conclusionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rhythm in speech and animal vocalizations: a cross‐species perspective

Ravignani

Bella

Falk

et al. 2019

Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences

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Why does human speech have rhythm? As we cannot travel back in time to witness how speech developed its rhythmic properties and why humans have the cognitive skills to process them, we rely on alternative methods to find out. One powerful tool is the comparative approach: studying the presence or absence of cognitive/behavioral traits in other species to determine which traits are shared between species and which are recent human inventions. Vocalizations of many species exhibit temporal structure, but little is known about how these rhythmic structures evolved, are perceived and produced, their biological and developmental bases, and communicative functions. We review the literature on rhythm in speech and animal vocalizations as a first step toward understanding similarities and differences across species. We extend this review to quantitative techniques that are useful for computing rhythmic structure in acoustic sequences and hence facilitate cross‐species research. We report links between vocal perception and motor coordination and the differentiation of rhythm based on hierarchical temporal structure. While still far from a complete cross‐species perspective of speech rhythm, our review puts some pieces of the puzzle together.

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Section: General Discussion and Conclusionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rhythm in speech and animal vocalizations: a cross‐species perspective

Ravignani

Bella

Falk

et al. 2019

Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences

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“…Circumstantial sound symbolic mappings, on the other hand, are based on very salient languageexternal factors of the surrounding world, and are rare in general. Thus, imitative sound symbolism (48.8% of all mappings, of which 26.4% is onomatopoeia and 22.1% is vocal gestures) may be so common because it is the most accessible type of mapping for basic vocabulary, and arguably also the simplest and most salient one, despite a considerable amount of indirectness (Edmiston et al 2018).…”

Section: Scaffolding Effects Of Iconicity On the Lexical Core Of Langmentioning

confidence: 99%

The typology of sound symbolism: Defining macro-concepts via their semantic and phonetic features

Johansson

Anikin

Carling

et al. 2020

Linguistic Typology

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Sound symbolism emerged as a prevalent component in the origin and development of language. However, as previous studies have either been lacking in scope or in phonetic granularity, the present study investigates the phonetic and semantic features involved from a bottom-up perspective. By analyzing the phonemes of 344 near-universal concepts in 245 language families, we establish 125 sound-meaning associations. The results also show that between 19 and 40 of the items of the Swadesh-100 list are sound symbolic, which calls into question the list’s ability to determine genetic relationships. In addition, by combining co-occurring semantic and phonetic features between the sound symbolic concepts, 20 macro-concepts can be identified, e. g. basic descriptors, deictic distinctions and kinship attributes. Furthermore, all identified macro-concepts can be grounded in four types of sound symbolism: (a) unimodal imitation (onomatopoeia); (b) cross-modal imitation (vocal gestures); (c) diagrammatic mappings based on relation (relative); or (d) situational mappings (circumstantial). These findings show that sound symbolism is rooted in the human perception of the body and its interaction with the surrounding world, and could therefore have originated as a bootstrapping mechanism, which can help us understand the bio-cultural origins of human language, the mental lexicon and language diversity.

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“…The Mbendjele employ vocal imitation of environmental sounds such as animal calls and sounds of the forest for a number of purposes, including hunting and play, and Lewis notes that such diverse methods of communication may have played a key role in the survival of early humans. In addition, there has been recent work on the iconicity and word-likeness of vocal imitations, where imitations of environmental sounds were repeatedly imitated for 8 ‘generations’, along a chain of ‘speakers’ and listeners [30]. This process resulted in imitations that were more stable and word-like (in terms of the imitations in latter generations sounding more similar to one-another than those from earlier generations) whilst retaining salient acoustic characteristics that carry information about the sounds that were originally imitated.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Vocal imitation of percussion sounds: On the perceptual similarity between imitations and imitated sounds

2019

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Recent studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of the voice for communicating sonic ideas, and the accuracy with which it can be used to imitate acoustic instruments, synthesised sounds and environmental sounds. However, there has been little research on vocal imitation of percussion sounds, particularly concerning the perceptual similarity between imitations and the sounds being imitated. In the present study we address this by investigating how accurately musicians can vocally imitate percussion sounds, in terms of whether listeners consider the imitations ‘more similar’ to the imitated sounds than to other same–category sounds. In a vocal production task, 14 musicians imitated 30 drum sounds from five categories (cymbals, hats, kicks, snares, toms). Listeners were then asked to rate the similarity between the imitations and same–category drum sounds via web based listening test. We found that imitated sounds received the highest similarity ratings for 16 of the 30 sounds. The similarity between a given drum sound and its imitation was generally rated higher than for imitations of another same–category sound, however for some drum categories (snares and toms) certain sounds were consistently considered most similar to the imitations, irrespective of the sound being imitated. Finally, we apply an existing auditory image based measure for perceptual similarity between same–category drum sounds, to model the similarity ratings using linear mixed effect regression. The results indicate that this measure is a good predictor of perceptual similarity between imitations and imitated sounds, when compared to acoustic features containing only temporal or spectral features.

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Repeated imitation makes human vocalizations more word-like

Cited by 15 publications

References 48 publications

Rhythm in speech and animal vocalizations: a cross‐species perspective

Rhythm in speech and animal vocalizations: a cross‐species perspective

The typology of sound symbolism: Defining macro-concepts via their semantic and phonetic features

Vocal imitation of percussion sounds: On the perceptual similarity between imitations and imitated sounds

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