To create these very accurate imitations of speech formant frequencies, this elephant (named Koshik) places his trunk inside his mouth, modulating the shape of the vocal tract during controlled phonation.
Nevertheless, her calls are far from being a perfect imitation of our speech.
But instead he returned to Rome at the end of August, and his 14 Philippic orations (so called in imitation of Demosthenes' speeches against Philip II of Macedonia), the first delivered on Sept. 2, 44, the last on April 21, 43, mark his vigorous reentry into politics.
In contrast to focus and imitation, the aspects of speech communication that we examined in the other items could be expected to have immediate consequences for the parent child exchange.
The words I heard emerging from my mouth sounded like imitations of human speech.
(She does funny imitations of the speech of both men).
Parrots have neither lips nor teeth, but that doesn't stop them from producing dead-on imitations of human speech.
In order to compare Koshik's imitations of human speech with the natural vocal repertoire of E. maximus, we analyzed a large set of calls of free-ranging Asian elephants (ncalls = 3921, where caller and context were observed for 620 calls, including 11 males and 51 females) and Asian elephants recorded in zoos (ncalls = 302, of 6 male and 6 female Asian elephants).
Finley's second act begins with an imitation of an acceptance speech, filled with gratitude but progresses quickly into darker territory.
Among birds, parrots and mynahs are talented imitators of the human voice [ 3, 4], but only a few convincing examples of speech imitation in nonhuman mammals are known.
The fact that both females and males learn complex songs makes these bats an excellent model--the first mammal ever--for investigating the link between vocal imitation and the emergence of speech, says W. Tecumseh Fitch, a cognitive ethologist at the University of Vienna, who was not involved in the study.
