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According topsychology experts, human toddlers are able to correctly match different kinds of vocalisations to different species.
The scientists from New York University and North Carolina University had found this startling fact by analyzing different questions like whether young infants expect humans or other animals to produce speech, and whether infants can identify the sources of vocalisations produced by other species.
Young children can identify humans speech, monkeys grunt, and ducks quack. But it’s not known when we came to know which vocalisations each of these animals produce.
In the experiment, the researchers showed five-month-old infants a series of separately presented pictures of human faces and rhesus monkey faces paired either with human speech or with rhesus vocalisations.
They saw that, the infants took more interest on human pictures when human vocalizations were presented and attended more to pictures of rhesus monkey faces when rhesus vocalisations were presented. However, the infants couldn’t recognize the human-produced non-speech vocalisations like laughter. It suggested that, the infants are especially acquainted with some of the functional properties of speech from an early age of their life.
These findings have been published in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
