WoGEL Friday (20/9) with Axel Ekström

In Working Groups of General Empirical Linguistics, an informal association of researchers interested in language, a new talk will take place, the first in this term. Axel Ekström (KTH Royal Institute of Technology) presents: "Vowels in speech and vowel-like sounds in nature".

Axel's abstract:

Human speech sounds spoken in isolation are roughly describable in terms of their physical-acoustic properties and can, accordingly, be modeled given the dimensions and properties of vocal tracts. Similarly, phonetic capacities of nonhuman vocal apparatuses may be studied from a point of view of articulatory dynamics: however, several distinctions must be made if such attempts are to be persuasive. In particular, modeling efforts aimed at providing descriptions must incorporate the degrees of freedom of (for example) the jaw and tongue of the species under examination. Importantly, however, while recent work has described a range of “vowel-like” behaviors in a number of species, the underlying biomechanics have been almost wholly neglected. In this presentation, I describe work aimed at elucidating the articulatory underpinnings of vocal behavior and “vowel-like” vocalizations in domestic cats, wolves, and chimpanzees. I show that acoustics alone (whether something appears “vowel-like”) is insufficient for ascribing underlying biomechanical properties to animal vocal tracts. For primate vocalizations in particular, this is significant, as it means that speech-like sounds cannot be used to infer phylogenetic relationships directly or be used to “date” the appearance of some pseudo-linguistic function or behavior in human ancestry. Realistic evolutionary applications require that the circumstances of articulation are taken into account.