Monkey Say: Marmosets Learn to Call the Same Way Human Babies Learn to Babble

Summary: Just as a baby’s babbles begin to sound more like recognizable human speech if they receive frequent vocal feedback from adults, the same kind of interaction speeds up speech acquisition in marmosets, a new study reveals.

Source: Princeton.

A baby’s babbles start to sound like speech more quickly if they get frequent vocal feedback from adults. Princeton University researchers have found the same type of feedback speeds the vocal development of infant marmoset monkeys, in the first evidence of such learning in nonhuman primates.

“We wanted to find out whether the idea that monkeys don’t do any learning during their vocal development is actually true,” said the study’s senior co-author Asif Ghazanfar, a professor of psychology and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute (PNI). “So we picked a species that we know really relies on vocalizations as its primary social signals. What we found in marmoset vocal development very closely parallels pre-linguistic vocal development in humans.”

The findings are detailed in an article titled “Vocal Learning via Social Reinforcement by Infant Marmoset Monkeys” published Thursday, May 25, in the journal Current Biology. Along with Ghazanfar, the authors are Daniel Takahashi, an associate research scholar at PNI, and Diana Liao, a graduate student at PNI.

Although marmoset vocal calls do not approach the complexity of human language systems, vocal development in both species begins with infants making more or less random sounds.

“When an infant blurts out something and the parent responds, that’s a contingent response. And the more often a parent provides that contingent response, the faster the human infant will develop its vocalizations,” Ghazanfar said.

To find out whether the same principle held true for marmosets, Ghazanfar and his colleagues set up an experiment using pairs of fraternal twin marmosets, small, highly social monkeys from South America. Starting from the day after the marmosets were born, the researchers would separate the infants from the adult marmosets for 40 minutes each day. In the first 10 minutes, they recorded the noises that the infant marmosets made while sitting alone. Then, for the next half hour, the researchers gave the young marmosets contingent feedback in the form of audio playbacks of the parent’s calls.

One twin in each pair got consistent feedback, mirroring what a young marmoset would receive from an especially attentive parent; the other twin got less consistent feedback on their vocalizations. They repeated these experiments up until the infants were 2 months old, roughly the equivalent of 2 years old in marmoset years.

Even though these sessions lasted less than an hour each day, infant marmosets that received lots of contingent feedback developed adult-sounding calls more rapidly than their siblings.

“When they’re infants, this call is really noisy,” Ghazanfar said. “It sounds kind of coarse, and then gradually it becomes very clean and tonal like an adult call.”

Previous studies had found a correlation between the amount of feedback marmosets get from parents and the rate of vocal development, but the experimental design in this study more firmly establishes the causality between parental responses and vocal development, the researchers say.

“This system of vocal learning production may be linked to the idea that an infant that more quickly produces adult-sounding calls is more likely to get care from a caregiver in a cooperative breeding environment where multiple individuals could be that caregiver in addition to the parents,” Ghazanfar said. “So it’s not only this process of learning that’s similar to humans; the whole reproductive strategy is similar to humans.”

Image shows a marmoset monkey.
Although marmoset vocal calls do not approach the complexity of human language systems, vocal development in both species begins with infants making more or less random sounds. NeuroscienceNews.com image is for illustrative purposes only.

The researchers’ next steps will include collecting more detailed data on marmosets’ neural activity when they are chattering or calling to neighbors, Ghazanfar said.

Even though marmosets can’t “talk” in the same way humans do, understanding marmoset communication may help us understand the evolution and development of speech.

“Vocal production learning isn’t just about imitation,” Ghazanfar said. “And you can no longer say that nonhuman primates shows no evidence of vocal learning.”

About this neuroscience research article

Funding: This work was supported by a Scholar Award from the James S. McDonnell Foundation (#220020238) and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.

Source: Princeton
Image Source: NeuroscienceNews.com image is in the public domain.
Original Research: Full open access research for “Vocal Learning via Social Reinforcement by Infant Marmoset Monkeys” by Daniel Y. Takahashi, Diana A. Liao, and Asif A. Ghazanfar in Current Biology. Published online May 25 2017 doi:10.1016/j.cub.2017.05.004

Cite This NeuroscienceNews.com Article

[cbtabs][cbtab title=”MLA”]Princeton “Monkey Say: Marmosets Learn to Call the Same Way Human Babies Learn to Babble.” NeuroscienceNews. NeuroscienceNews, 26 May 2017.
<https://neurosciencenews.com/monkey-language-acquisition-6776/>.[/cbtab][cbtab title=”APA”]Princeton (2017, May 26). Monkey Say: Marmosets Learn to Call the Same Way Human Babies Learn to Babble. NeuroscienceNew. Retrieved May 26, 2017 from https://neurosciencenews.com/monkey-language-acquisition-6776/[/cbtab][cbtab title=”Chicago”]Princeton “Monkey Say: Marmosets Learn to Call the Same Way Human Babies Learn to Babble.” https://neurosciencenews.com/monkey-language-acquisition-6776/ (accessed May 26, 2017).[/cbtab][/cbtabs]


Abstract

Vocal Learning via Social Reinforcement by Infant Marmoset Monkeys

Highlights
•Development of marmoset contact calls is influenced by contingent parental feedback
•Use of twin infants controlled for genetics, perinatal experience, and growth
•This is the first experimental evidence for vocal production learning in infant monkeys

Summary
For over half a century now, primate vocalizations have been thought to undergo little or no experience-dependent acoustic changes during development. If any changes are apparent, then they are routinely (and quite reasonably) attributed to the passive consequences of growth. Indeed, previous experiments on squirrel monkeys and macaque monkeys showed that social isolation, deafness, cross-fostering and parental absence have little or no effect on vocal development. Here, we explicitly test in marmoset monkeys—a very vocal and cooperatively breeding species—whether the transformation of immature into mature contact calls by infants is influenced by contingent parental vocal feedback. Using a closed-loop design, we experimentally provided more versus less contingent vocal feedback to twin infant marmoset monkeys over their first 2 months of life, the interval during which their contact calls transform from noisy, immature calls to tonal adult-like “phee” calls. Infants who received more contingent feedback had a faster rate of vocal development, producing mature-sounding contact calls earlier than the other twin. The differential rate of vocal development was not linked to genetics, perinatal experience, or body growth; nor did the amount of contingency influence the overall rate of spontaneous vocal production. Thus, we provide the first experimental evidence for production-related vocal learning during the development of a nonhuman primate.

“Vocal Learning via Social Reinforcement by Infant Marmoset Monkeys” by Daniel Y. Takahashi, Diana A. Liao, and Asif A. Ghazanfar in Current Biology. Published online May 25 2017 doi:10.1016/j.cub.2017.05.004

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