We’ve all seen videos of “talking” animals, from thrashing parrots and warbling huskies to petrified cats. Bizarre and seemingly human-like as these behaviors might be, they’re all variations on the animals’ natural vocal repertoires. Rocky the orangutan is another story. Researchers say he’s learned to imitate human speech by making noises he’d never use otherwise. They published their findings in the journal Scientific Reports.
Teaching Rocky to talk is not just a party trick. As our very near relatives, the great apes have a lot to teach humans about our natural history. One element of that history is speech. Scientists have long believed that humans are the only apes who can control their voices enough to really speak, but new research is challenging that idea. A 2015 study by Adriano Lameira, president and founder of the Pongo Foundation, found that a 50-year-old orangutan named Tilda could use her voice to echo the pace and rhythm—although not the actual sounds—of human speech.
Lameira wondered what else orangutans could do. He and his colleagues designed an experiment in the form of a game for an 8-year-old male named Rocky who lives at the Indianapolis Zoo. Researchers had had their eye on Rocky for a few years, as the young ape already appeared to regularly use non-orangutan noises in order to attract his caretakers’ attention.
Kenneth M
Hmm –
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJkWS4t4l0k
john n
Peanut
thomas w
i said the same thing
SantiamLady
Just sounds like grunting to me. ?
Kay S
I’m not belittling their achievement, but my dog can say hi, bye and no. It’s just a matter of rewarding him when he made a sound that sounded like those words. It appears to outsiders that he uses them in context when you use certain words to prompt him. This looks to me to be exactly what the orangutan’s handlers are doing. It’d be great if I was wrong, but I’m afraid I’ll take a bit more convincing.
Michael L
Sounds like you have a smart dog…
cyndie r
food driven