Researchers are going bananas.
A new scientific paper reports that chimpanzees “are capable of” producing sounds that mimic words they hear from people. It follows recent research revealing that chimpanzees can gesture to one another in conversation like humans.
The new research looked at two archived videos of chimps “uttering” words on camera — one clip from the mid-2000s and another from the 1960s.
In both cases, the apes uttered the word “mama” when given cues from their handlers. It defies previous beliefs that speech was beyond chimpanzees’ “neural circuitry,” researchers noted.
“Great ape vocal production capacities have been underestimated,” the paper read. “Chimpanzees possess the neural building blocks necessary for speech.”
The more recent example of the two, filmed inside Suncoast Primate Center in Palm Harbor, Florida, saw a chimpanzee named Johnny speak the word in exchange for a red Twizzler when prompted by a caretaker to say it.
Johnny’s deep-pitched cadence sounded eerily similar to Andy Serkis’ English-fluent chimpanzee Caesar from the “Planet of the Apes” film franchise — as pointed out by several commenters on the 16-year-old clip.
Researchers also noted that, according to the video’s origin, Johnny “knew that [saying] Mama would get him anything he wanted as long as it was on his diet.”
Back in 1962, footage of Renata, a Chimpanzee in Italy, also showed her speaking the word when given a touch to the chin from a human — the researchers called it a form of “reinforcement learning.”
“Renata reliably produced ‘mama,’” they wrote.
Both cases in which the chimps “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, scientists noted. There is nearly 99% of shared DNA, after all.
“Accordingly, it has been argued that ‘mama’ may have been among the first words to appear in human speech,” the research team suggested.
“Our data complements this picture: chimpanzees can produce the putative ‘first words’ of spoken languages.”
