Did human speech evolve from bird song?

Thursday, June 12, 2014 - 3:30pm

If you examine the human language closely, it resembles the speech forms of two other animals on the planet: birds and nonhuman primates. Now, linguists and biologists are speculating that our speech evolved with the help of chirping birds, or bird song, and some of the alarm calls of monkeys, Nature World News reports. Their hypothesis, described this week in Frontiers in Psychology, suggests that while listening to birds led to the melodic part of our language, listening to other primate communication helped us learn how to add complex meaning and content.

Source: Frontiers in Psychology

http://news.sciencemag.org/sifter/2014/06/did-human-speech-evolve-from-bird-song