Carl Zimmer in the New York Times:
If you’ve ever cooed at a baby, you have participated in a very special experience. Indeed, it’s an all but unique one: Whereas humans constantly chatter to their infants, other apes hardly ever do so, a new study reveals.
“It’s a new feature that has evolved and massively expanded in our species,” said Johanna Schick, a linguist at the University of Zurich and an author of the study. And that expansion, Dr. Schick and her colleagues argue, may have been crucial to the evolution of language.
Other mammals can bark, meow, roar and hoot. But no other species can use a set of sounds to produce words, nor build sentences with those words to convey an infinite variety of meaning. To trace the origin of our gift of language, researchers often study apes, our closest living relatives.
More here.
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