Studies of human development and swallowing show that a supralaryngeal vocal tract (SVT) capable of producing quantal vowels involves (1) facial restructuring yielding a short oral cavity; (2) a tongue that moves down into the pharynx carrying the larynx down with it; and (3) a long neck. The skeletal features of hominid fossils suggest the absence of fully human speech anatomy until 100<th>000 years ago. With long faces and short necks, Neanderthals and early anatomically modern humans could not have possessed SVTs capable of swallowing and of producing fully human speech. Probable [i] SVT shapes were computer‐modeled from perturbations of vocal‐tract area functions obtained from MRIs of adult humans. When normalized to the length of an adult human SVT, F1/F2 patterns fall outside of the range of Peterson and Barney’s [‘‘Control methods used in a study of the vowels,’’ J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 30, 739–742 (1952)] data used by Lieberman and Crelin, ‘‘On the speech of Neanderthal man,’’ Linquistic Inquiry 2, 203–222 (1971) to assess Neanderthal speech), but at the extreme range for [i] as measured by Hillenbrand et al. [‘‘Acoustic characteristics of American‐English vowels,’’ J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 97, 3099–3111 (1995)]. In neither case are the high‐frequency spectra characteristic of human quantal [i]’s. F1/F2 patterns for unnormalized SVTs fall outside the human range for both plots.
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May 2006
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May 04 2006
The recent origin of human speech
Philip Lieberman;
Philip Lieberman
Cognit. and Linguistic Sci., Brown Univ., Providence, RI 02912‐1978
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Robert C. McCarthy;
Robert C. McCarthy
Florida Atlantic Univ., Boca Raton, FL 33431
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David Strait
David Strait
State Univ. of New York at Albany, Albany, NY
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J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 119, 3441 (2006)
Citation
Philip Lieberman, Robert C. McCarthy, David Strait; The recent origin of human speech. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 1 May 2006; 119 (5_Supplement): 3441. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.4786937
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