Tuesday , March 26 2024

Imagine! Study Shows Goats Apparently Have Accents

A study has found that the social environment of goats shapes their calls and makes them pick up accents.

Goats don’t have their own language, but they do seem able to pick up accents from one another, scientists found in a study of calls made by young goats.

The researchers say their results could have implications for our understanding of the evolution of vocal learning, or as it is known in humans, speech.

The ability to learn a range of sounds and modify them according to the environment was thought to be reserved to a handful of animals, including some birds, whales, dolphins, bats, elephants, and the most extreme example, us.

The goat calls reveal these animals are capable of a rudimentary form of vocal learning, and they hint that similar abilities may have gone undetected elsewhere, according to researchers at Queen Mary University of London.

“This suggests an early step in the evolution of vocal communication, leading to the advanced and unique vocal-learning abilities found in humans, which allow us to speak,” write study researchers Elodie Briefer and Alan McElligott in a study made available today (Feb. 15) by the journal Animal Behavior.

Goats are social animals that live in groups and make “contact calls” to one another to stay in touch, Briefer explained.

The researchers compared the calls made by full and half-sibling pygmy goats living in different social groups when they were 1 week and 5 weeks old. At 1 week, the kids’ calls showed limited similarities to other members of their group. By 5 weeks old, the kids in the same group made calls with overall structures that were more similar. Most important, the half-siblings living in the same groups made more similar calls over time. [Listen to the Goat Calls]

READ ALSO  Real Madrid win Champions League

This indicates that the kids’ social environment, not just their genetics, played a role in shaping the calls they make, effectively giving them accents.

“Our results support the growing and controversial evidence that social context plays a role in shaping vocal communication systems,” they write. “Such surprising plasticity could be present in most mammals, but has gone undetected.”

(m.csmonitor.com)

About Chinenye Nwabueze

Nwabueze is a writer with passion for cutting-edge news

Check Also

Florida student knocks out teacher then pummels her unconscious body after she seized his Nintendo Switch during class (video)

A 17-year-old student at Matanzas High School in Palm Coast, Florida was arrested after he …

4 comments

  1. God is great by creating all this cute animals

  2. Salome Olisaeke

    This is hilarious ??? my goat too has an accent o

  3. Lol….American goat accent abi British goat accent ????

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

%d bloggers like this: