 |
Diagrammatic
representation of the comparative
approach (as discussed in ten Cate & Honing, 2022) |
Comparative studies can be done in several ways. One approach is to examine the sounds made by
animals and look for shared features or parallels with language or music. To study these, one can, for
example, examine how the structure of a sequence of sounds compares to syntactic structures in
language or rhythmic structures in music, or whether harmonic sounds are recognized by their pitch
(like in music) or by their spectral structure (like in speech). The presence of such features can
indicate that similar sensory or cognitive mechanisms may underlie their perception and production
and those needed for language and music in humans. However, one needs to be cautious with
drawing such conclusions. That a sound produced by an animal has certain features in common with
language or music may be incidental and a result of human interpretation, rather than indicating
shared mechanisms per se. Animal sounds showing, for example, a specific rhythmic pattern (e.g., in
the call of the
indri, a lemur species; De Gregorio et al., 2021) or that contain tones based on a
harmonic series (e.g., in the hermit thrush; Doolittle et al., 2014), need not indicate an ability of the
animal to perceive or produce rhythms or harmonic sounds in general, as is common in humans. To
show this, it is necessary to demonstrate the perception or production of such patterns outside and
beyond what is realized in the species-specific sound patterns. This requires a
second approach: using controlled experiments to address whether animals can (learn to) distinguish
and generalize artificially constructed sounds that differ in specific linguistic or musical features. The
two approaches, observational-analytical and experimental, are complementary: the first one may
hint at presence of a certain ability, while the second one can test its existence and the limits of the
capacity (Adapted from:
ten Cate & Honing).
De Gregorio, C., Valente, D., Raimondi, T., Torti, V., Miaretsoa, L., Friard, O., Giacoma, C., Ravignani, A. & Gamba, M. (2021). Categorical rhythms in a singing primate. Current Biology, 31(20), R1379–R1380. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2021.09.032
Doolittle, E. L., Gingras, B., Endres, D. M. & Fitch, W. T. (2014). Overtone-based pitch selection in hermit thrush song: Unexpected convergence with scale construction in human music. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 11(46), 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1406023111
Ten Cate, C. & & Honing, H. (2023, in press). Precursors of Music and Language in Animals. Sammler, D.
(ed.) Oxford Handbook of Language and Music Oxford: Oxford University Press. Preprint: psyarxiv.com/4zxtr.
