Following ideas of Ch. S. Peirce on continuity of mind (synechism) and universality of semiotic processes (pansemiotism) as well as development of the understanding of manipulative abduction in works of L. Magnani the thesis of possibility of abductive reasoning in non-human animal minds is defended. The animal capacity to form explanatory hypotheses is demonstrated by instances of grasping regularities in environment, behavior of conspecifics and even self-knowledge. In the framework of debate on instinctual or rather inferential nature of abductive capacity (...) questions of innate and acquired mechanisms of learning, the role of language in development of explanations and priority of inner (emotional) or outer (referential) perspectives in genesis of first explanatory hypotheses are considered. (shrink)

Among human and non-human animals, the ability to respond rapidly to biologically significant events in the environment is essential for survival and development. Research has confirmed that human adult listeners respond emotionally to environmental sounds by relying on the same acoustic cues that signal emotionality in speech prosody and music. However, it is unknown whether young children also respond emotionally to environmental sounds. Here, we report that changes in pitch, rate (i.e. playback speed), and intensity (i.e. amplitude) of environmental sounds (...) trigger emotional responses in 3- to 6-year-old American and Chinese children, including four sound types: sounds of human actions, animal calls, machinery, and natural phenomena such as wind and waves. Children’s responses did not differ across the four types of sounds used but developed with age – a finding observed in both American and Chinese children. Thus, the ability to respond emotionally to non-linguistic, non-music environmental sounds is evident at three years of age – an age when the ability to decode emotional prosody in language and music emerges. We argue that general mechanisms that support emotional prosody decoding are engaged by all sounds, as reflected in emotional responses to non-linguistic acoustic input such as music and environmental sounds. (shrink)

This article concerns sound aesthetic preferences for European foreign languages. We investigated the phonetic-acoustic dimension of the linguistic aesthetic pleasure to describe the “music” found in European languages. The Romance languages, French, Italian, and Spanish, take a lead when people talk about melodious language – the music-like effects in the language (a.k.a., phonetic chill). On the other end of the melodiousness spectrum are German and Arabic that are often considered sounding harsh and un-attractive. Despite the public interest, limited research has (...) been conducted on the topic of phonaesthetics, i.e., the subfield of phonetics that is concerned with the aesthetic properties of speech sounds (Crystal, 2008). Our goal is to fill the existing research gap by identifying the acoustic features that drive the auditory perception of language sound beauty. What is so music-like in the language that makes people say “it is music in my ears”? We had 45 central European participants listening to 16 auditorily presented European languages and rating each language in terms of 22 binary characteristics (e.g., beautiful – ugly and funny – boring) plus indicating their language familiarities, L2 backgrounds, speaker voice liking, demographics, and musicality levels. Findings revealed that all factors in complex interplay explain a certain percentage of variance: familiarity and expertise in foreign languages, speaker voice characteristics, phonetic complexity, musical acoustic properties, and finally musical expertise of the listener. The most important discovery was the trade-off between speech tempo and so-called linguistic melody (pitch variance): the faster the language, the flatter/more atonal it is in terms of the pitch (speech melody), making it highly appealing acoustically (sounding beautiful and sexy), but not so melodious in a “musical” sense. (shrink)

How music and speech evolved is a mystery. Several hypotheses on their origins, including one on their joint origins, have been put forward but rarely tested. Here we report and comment on the first experiment testing the hypothesis that speech and music bifurcated from a common system. We highlight strengths of the reported experiment, point out its relatedness to animal work, and suggest three alternative interpretations of its results. We conclude by sketching a future empirical programme extending this work.