An orangutan named Rocky is helping scientists figure out when early humans might have uttered the first word. Rocky, who is 12 and lives at the Indianapolis Zoo, has shown that he can control his ...

Some of them can make certain dismal, guttural groans or croaks, others can utter shrill, discordant sounds; but at best the reptilian vocal apparatus is rudimentary in the extreme. Hence in those ...

Testosterone quite literally shapes the vocal apparatus, causing the larynx to enlarge and the vocal cords to thicken during puberty. This physical transformation creates the deeper resonance ...

“That is only possible if our vocal apparatus is easy for our brains to control.” However, Adriano Lameira, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Warwick in the U.K. who was not ...

That is only possible if our vocal apparatus is easy for our brains to control,” says Richard Futrell at the University of California, Irvine. “If the system is complex, then it will behave in ...

“There seems to be a special fast path for control of the vocal apparatus in humans that enables humans to produce more different sounds reliably,” Futrell says. Another possible explanation is that ...

Their vocalizations are produced using their complex vocal apparatus, which allows for a wide range of sounds. This mimicry ...

As each report arrives, the brain tells the vocal apparatus to go ahead and speak the next syllable. The whole thing happens so rapidly and smoothly that the speaker is rarely conscious of it.

Advances in imaging, computational fluid dynamics, and machine learning have enabled researchers to build detailed three‐dimensional models of the vocal apparatus. These models simulate the ...