By MATT WALKER - BBC NATURE
Added: Thu, 07 Jul 2011 19:02:53 UTC

A talented chimpanzee called Panzee can recognise distorted and incomplete words spoken by a computer, scientists have discovered.

Panzee, a chimp with a talent for words

That suggests that apes may be more capable of perceiving spoken sounds than previously thought, and that the common ancestor of humans and chimps may also have had this ability.

It also refutes the idea that humans have brains uniquely adapted to process speech, say the scientists who have published their findings in the journal Current Biology.

Panzee was raised from 8 days old, by humans, and was spoken to and treated as if she were human. At the same time, she was taught to use symbols called lexigrams to communicate.

Panzee uses symbols called lexigrams to communicate

"This has resulted in Panzee showing proficiency in understanding approximately 130 English words," researcher Lisa Heimbauer told BBC Nature.

That made her an ideal subject to test hypotheses about how well other species, rather than humans, might be able to understand speech.

"There is a view about the human ability to produce and perceive speech that is called 'Speech is Special'," said Ms Heimbauer, who is studying for her PhD.

"This argument proposes that, besides humans being the only species able to produce speech, due to their anatomy, they also have a specialised, cognitive module to process speech."

Evidence for that comes from studies showing that humans can understand speech even when it is incomplete or highly distorted.

"However, an alternative view is that auditory processing is fundamentally similar across most mammals, and that animals therefore have latent abilities for speech perception," said Ms Heimbauer.

So she and her colleagues Michael Beran and Michael Owren, all from Georgia State University in Atlanta, US, tested Panzee to find out if she too could recognise incomplete or distorted spoken words.

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TAGGED: BEHAVIOR, BIOLOGY, EVOLUTION, SCIENCE