Evidence for phylogenetic continuity in nonverbal vocalisations

摘要

Vocalisations like laughs and screams occur across a range of species. Here, we examine acoustic similarity between human and chimpanzee vocalisations produced in matched behavioural contexts, using comparisons of Euclidian distances based on acoustic features and unsupervised clustering methods. The results show that vocalisations produced in several contexts (e.g., being attacked by a conspecific, discovering a large food source) were acoustically similar across humans and chimpanzee vocalisations.