語言非人類專有：黑猩猩或能懂人話
Scientists have always thought that one of the basic differences between us and our closest evolutionary cousins, chimpanzees, has been the ability to perceive and process speech. But that might not be the case.
Scientists now suspect that a “common ancestor” of chimps and humans evolved with the capacity for speech - and the human ability to perceive and process it might be more to do with being exposed to language when we are very young than any innate ability.
What separates us from the apes might just be practice.
New research with a 25-year-old chimp, Panzee, has shown that Panzee can “interpret” highly distorted speech sounds - in a way similar to humans.
Panzee can also interpret symbols, and can understand more than 100 spoken and digitised words - including a symbol for his own name.
Lisa Heimbauer, a researcher at Georgia State University's Language Research Centre, said: “I think our results just reinforce the fact that experience matters.”
“Humans maybe do not perceive speech because they are human, but instead because of the tremendous amount of experience they have with it from birth.”
Previously, the human brain has been thought to be uniquely evolved to perceive what is and isn't speech.據英國《每日郵報》11月1日報道，科學家長期以來認爲人類與人類的近親——黑猩猩之間的基本區別之一是理解與加工語言的能力。但該觀點也許並不屬實。
科學家們目前懷疑黑猩猩和人類的共同祖先在進化時是擁有語言能力的，而人類擁有理解和加工語言的能力或許是因爲我們在很小的時候(在熟練運用許多先天技能之前)就更多的接觸了語言。
語言實踐或許是區分我們和黑猩猩語言能力的因素。
一項新研究觀察了一隻25歲名叫Panzee 的黑猩猩。研究顯示出Panzee能理解高度失真的語音，這在某種程度上與人類相似。
Panzee還能理解符號和超過100個口語化和數字化的單詞，包括表示它名字的符號。
喬治亞洲立大學語言研究中心的研究院研究員麗莎說：“我想我們的研究結果僅僅補充論證了語言經驗導致這一區別的事實。”
“或許人類能理解語言的原因不是因爲他們是人，而是因爲人類從一出生就接觸了極其豐富的語言經驗。”
在此之前，只有人類的大腦被認爲進化到了可以識別語言的程度。
