Chimpanzees seem ‘capable’ of human speech: researchers

Researchers are using bananas.

A new scientific paper reports that chimpanzees “are capable” of producing sounds that mimic the words they hear from humans. It follows recent research revealing that chimpanzees can gesture to each other in conversation just like humans.

The new research looked at two archived videos of chimpanzees “speaking” words into the camera – one from the mid-2000s and another from the 1960s.

In both cases, the monkeys uttered the word “mama” when cued by their handlers. It challenges previous beliefs that speech was beyond the “neural circuits” of chimpanzees, the researchers noted.

“The great vocal production capacities of monkeys have been underestimated,” the paper wrote. “Chimpanzees possess the neural building blocks needed for speech.”

The most recent example of the two, filmed inside the Suncoast Primate Center in Palm Harbor, Florida, saw a chimpanzee named Johnny say the word in exchange for a red Twizzler when prompted by a keeper to say it.

Johnny’s deep cadence sounded eerily similar to Andy Serkis’ fluent English-speaking chimpanzee Caesar from the Planet of the Apes film franchise – as pointed out by some commenters on the 16-year-old clip.

The researchers also noted that, according to the video’s originator, Johnny “knew it [saying] Mom would give him anything he wanted as long as it was on his diet.”

In 1962, footage of Renata, a chimpanzee in Italy, also showed her speaking when given a chin touch by a human – researchers called it a form of “reinforcement learning”.

“Renata reliably produced ‘Mama,'” they wrote.

Both cases in which chimpanzees “possessed the necessary control” for human-like speech are a demonstration that primates can shift their speech and jaw muscles for consonant and vowel sounds, the scientists noted. After all, there is almost 99% of shared DNA.

“Consequently, it has been argued that ‘mama’ may have been among the first words to appear in human speech,” the research team suggested.

“Our data complete this picture: chimpanzees can produce the putative ‘first words’ of spoken languages.”