Shared means and meanings in vocal expression of man and macaque

Vocalisations of six Macaca arctoides that were categorised according to their social context and judgements of naïve human listeners as expressions of plea/submission, anger, fear, dominance, contentment and emotional neutrality, were compared with vowel samples extracted from simulations of emotional-motivational connotations by the Finnish name Saara and English name Sarah. The words were spoken by seven Finnish and 13 English women. Humans and monkeys resembled each other in the following respects. 'Neutral', 'pleading' and 'commanding' had a similar F0 level. Loud vocalisations of intense 'anger' and 'fear' had both high F0, and the highest values were encountered for 'fear'. Compared with 'neutral', the audiosignal waveform of 'plea/submission' was more sinusoidal, seen in the spectrum as an attenuation of formants and an emphasis of the fundamental, whereas the signal waveform of 'commanding' was more complex corresponding to an increase in noise and a wider distribution of spectral energy. 'Frightened' samples included rather harmonic segments with emphasis of the fundamental, and 'angry' samples included more noise at the low end of the spectrum and often segments with low-frequency (<100 Hz) edged modulation. Sounds resembling soft and noisy 'content' grunts of the monkey do not appear in Finnish or English speech but 'content' utterances were, however, associated with low speech pressure, attenuation of harmonics and increase in noise.

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