Abstract

I provide an overview of the studies on human speech and animal communication, showing that the formants, or vocal tract resonances, are crucial acoustic features of human and nonhuman vocalizations. The formants of nonhuman mammals possess the potential to provide conspecifics with cues to emitter's body size, species and individual identity. The findings reviewed in this paper suggest that human phonetic abilities may have evolved separately from formant perception and possibly at a later stage, as the widespread use of formants in animal communication would indicate.