Little research has been conducted on the question of how our closest livingrelatives, the chimpanzees, learn to produce and comprehend their own naturalvocal repertoire from early infancy. Current theories and models of vocal development and vocal learning rely almost exclusively on research conductedwith non-primates, mainly songbirds. However, there are a number of reasons toremain cautious when trying to apply these models to non-human primate vocaldevelopment or speech acquisition. For example, as with non-human primates,human infants go through a lengthy phase of non-linguistic vocal behaviourprior to speech production, which is largely responsive to ongoing social events.Birdsong, in contrast, is a sexually selected behaviour that functions inmaximising reproductive success; and as such is probably based on fundamentally different psychological mechanisms.
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