Kanzi’s Vocal Symbols Sounded Distorted

Kanzi, a male bonobo studied for language and cognition, learned to understand spoken English and communicate with lexigrams rather than normal speech. Researchers noticed that when he used the graphic symbols, he often paired them with his own vocalizations. Later, they found that Kanzi was producing vocal equivalents of the symbols he selected, but in a very high pitch and with distortions. His vocal tract prevented clear human-like speech, but the finding suggested that his sounds were not random noise.

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