Babies listen to lemur vocalizations in the same way that they listen to human speech.
A baby's language skills develop rapidly during the first year, and previous research has shown that by three months, hearing human speech while viewing objects helps infants to group objects into categories. Alissa Ferry at the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy, and her colleagues examined how recordings of calls from a lemur (Eulemur macaco flavifrons; pictured) influenced how infants performed when they were asked to discriminate between images of dinosaurs and fish.
The team found that lemur calls helped three- to four-month-old infants to categorize objects but did not help six-month-olds. The study suggests that the link between language and the capacity to categorize objects is initially broad enough to include calls from non-human primates, but quickly becomes tuned to human language.
Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA http://doi.org/nqx (2013)
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Babies hear a primate's call. Nature 501, 139 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/501139a
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/501139a
