Universal Cues

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While traveling, it may be necessary to communicate without the ability to speak one of the estimated 7,000 languages that exist around the world. As a result, humans often rely on context clues, hand gestures or facial expressions in the hopes that some aspects of human communication might be universal.

It turns out, some are, according to new research published this month in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

In the study, an interdisciplinary research team of linguists and bioacousticians led by Maïa Ponsonnet, Katarzyna Pisanski, and Christophe Coupé aimed to explore how certain emotions show regularities in their vocal expression across languages, hoping to shed light on the origins of human speech, according to Phys.org.

“Why did we humans start to speak, and other primates didn’t,” asked Ponsonnet. “We all produce laughter, and hundreds of species produce play-like vocalizations. Yet we are the only species that evolved spoken language. Looking at these commonalities across species can help us understand where humans diverged and how.”

To do this, the researchers analyzed vowels in interjections from 131 languages, comparing them with 500 vocalizations stemming from painful, joyful, or disgusting contexts.

The team found commonalities in speech, especially with vocalizations. Cries screams, and laughter have the same acoustic patterns for emotions such as pain, joy, and disgust across cultures. But interjections such as “Wow!” or “Ouch!” showed cultural variability, especially for joy and disgust, implying that these linguistic forms are less universal than raw vocal expressions.

Also, pain interjections featured similar open vowels, such as “a” and wide falling diphthongs, such as “ai” in “Ayy!” and “aw” in “Ouch!” For joyful or disgusted emotions, the interjections lacked commonalities between languages, contrary to the researchers’ predictions.

“Critically, by comparing interjections to vocalizations expressing the same emotions, we can test whether the acoustic patterns we observe in interjections can be traced back to vocalizations,” Ponsonnet said.

Meanwhile, the team added that vocalizations reflect adaptive or social functions.

“For example, babies’ cries tend to be loud and harsh, evolving to annoy parents enough to stop the aversive signal,” said Pisanki. “We expect vocal expressions of pain, disgust, and joy to reflect their functions, too.”

The team aims to build upon this research across more languages and cultures to understand how widespread vocal expressions arise and where they originate from.