The biological basis of speech: what to infer from talking to the animals

Speech perception and production are uniquely human adaptations. The mechanisms and laws that these adaptations implicate are tuned to linguistic rather than general auditory phenomena, leading to the view that speech is special (SiS). Despite the progress made by proponents of SiS, a small but growing "auditorist" program critical of SiS conscripts nonhuman animals such as quail and chinchilla and, using discrimination tasks on speech stimuli, incorrectly infers a common mechanism from similar cross-species performance. The author argues that the auditorist's refutation project must demonstrate not just cross-species isomorphisms of behavior but also either a common biological mechanism or common functional organization. The refutation project does neither. The author argues further that the auditorist's appeal to the principle of parsimony fails. Respect for the total available evidence undermines auditorism and bolsters SiS.