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Path: ...!2.eu.feeder.erje.net!feeder.erje.net!eternal-september.org!feeder3.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Tilde <invalide@invalid.invalid> Newsgroups: sci.lang Subject: "Open plains are not a level playing field for hominid consonant-like versus vowel-like calls" Date: Mon, 11 Mar 2024 22:05:47 -0600 Organization: squiggle Lines: 43 Message-ID: <usokat$3kjl$1@dont-email.me> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Injection-Date: Tue, 12 Mar 2024 04:05:49 -0000 (UTC) Injection-Info: dont-email.me; posting-host="383334ad15fb8f288d0470780fa16454"; logging-data="119413"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX1+ya9o7nlHpWw1RfT+ftLZ1" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/68.0 SeaMonkey/2.53.14 Cancel-Lock: sha1:wUQ9ZVpsvCZj9ZmFD2/mP9iDhHk= X-Mozilla-News-Host: snews://news.eternal-september.org:563 Bytes: 2659 This is rather neat. They evaluated acoustic performance of calls played over distances in a savannah like environment. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-48165-7 Published: 21 December 2023 Open plains are not a level playing field for hominid consonant-like versus vowel-like calls Abstract Africa’s paleo-climate change represents an “ecological black-box” along the evolutionary timeline of spoken language; a vocal hominid went in and, millions of years later, out came a verbal human. It is unknown whether or how a shift from forested, dense habitats towards drier, open ones affected hominid vocal communication, potentially setting stage for speech evolution. To recreate how arboreal proto-vowels and proto-consonants would have interacted with a new ecology at ground level, we assessed how a series of orangutan voiceless consonant-like and voiced vowel-like calls travelled across the savannah. Vowel-like calls performed poorly in comparison to their counterparts. Only consonant-like calls afforded effective perceptibility beyond 100 m distance without requiring repetition, as is characteristic of loud calling behaviour in nonhuman primates, typically composed by vowel-like calls. Results show that proto-consonants in human ancestors may have enhanced reliability of distance vocal communication across a canopy-to-ground ecotone. The ecological settings and soundscapes experienced by human ancestors may have had a more profound impact on the emergence and shape of spoken language than previously recognized.