Vocal tract dynamics shape the formant structure of conditioned vocalizations in a harbor seal.

Autor: Goncharova M; Comparative Bioacoustics Research Group, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, the Netherlands., Jadoul Y; Comparative Bioacoustics Research Group, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, the Netherlands.; Artificial Intelligence Lab, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium.; Department of Human Neurosciences, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy., Reichmuth C; Long Marine Laboratory, Institute of Marine Sciences, University of California Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, California, USA., Fitch WT; Department of Behavioral and Cognitive Biology, Vienna CogSciHub, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria., Ravignani A; Comparative Bioacoustics Research Group, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, the Netherlands.; Department of Human Neurosciences, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy.; Center for Music in the Brain, Department of Clinical Medicine, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark.
Jazyk: angličtina
Zdroj: Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences [Ann N Y Acad Sci] 2024 Aug; Vol. 1538 (1), pp. 107-116. Date of Electronic Publication: 2024 Aug 01.
DOI: 10.1111/nyas.15189
Abstrakt: Formants, or resonance frequencies of the upper vocal tract, are an essential part of acoustic communication. Articulatory gestures-such as jaw, tongue, lip, and soft palate movements-shape formant structure in human vocalizations, but little is known about how nonhuman mammals use those gestures to modify formant frequencies. Here, we report a case study with an adult male harbor seal trained to produce an arbitrary vocalization composed of multiple repetitions of the sound wa. We analyzed jaw movements frame-by-frame and matched them to the tracked formant modulation in the corresponding vocalizations. We found that the jaw opening angle was strongly correlated with the first (F1) and, to a lesser degree, with the second formant (F2). F2 variation was better explained by the jaw angle opening when the seal was lying on his back rather than on the belly, which might derive from soft tissue displacement due to gravity. These results show that harbor seals share some common articulatory traits with humans, where the F1 depends more on the jaw position than F2. We propose further in vivo investigations of seals to further test the role of the tongue on formant modulation in mammalian sound production.
(© 2024 The Author(s). Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of The New York Academy of Sciences.)
Databáze: MEDLINE
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