After communicating with gestures, early humans would then have gradually added spoken words that would have replaced these physical signals, according to this theory. Until now, researchers had assumed that human languages developed through the use of iconic gestures - such as wiggling your arm to mimic the movement of a snake - and other physical signals, Perlman said. They managed to suss out the meaning without any written or spoken prompts, well above what was expected by chance. In a second, smaller field experiment that involved just 12 of the most basic vocalizations, people who used spoken languages with no formal writing system, such as the Indigenous Palikúr of the Amazon rainforest - also demonstrated an understanding of vocalizations by pointing to pictures of the correct meanings after hearing them. The language speakers with the lowest accuracy were Thai speakers at an average of 52.1% and the best performing language speakers were English speakers with an average accuracy of 74.1%. Out of the 25 languages spoken by participants, speakers of 20 languages correctly guessed the meaning of each vocalization on average, speakers of four of the languages did so for all but one vocalization and speakers of the remaining language did so for all but two. "In others, there's probably more variability over precisely what that sound is." "These recognizable sounds are probably associated with these meanings across cultures," Perlman said. In general, people understood the vocalizations of actions and entities better than those for properties and demonstratives. The least recognizable was the demonstrative "that," with an accuracy of 34.5%, although it was still well over the 16.7% (one in six) expected by chance. The most recognizable vocalization was that for "sleep," which people identified with 98.6% accuracy. In the experiment, people accurately identified the meaning of these vocalizations 64.6% of the time, on average. Everyone who submitted a vocalization spoke English. Researchers obtained these vocalizations through an online contest where, in exchange for prizes, people could submit basic sounds that they felt best represented different words. The intended meanings for vocalizations were grouped into six main categories: animate entities (child, man, woman, tiger, snake, deer), inanimate entities (knife, fire, rock, water, meat, fruit), actions (gather, cook, hide, cut, pound, hunt, eat, sleep), properties (dull, sharp, big, small, good, bad), quantifiers (one, many) and demonstratives (this, that). The participants then had to match the sound to one of six words, including the intended meaning. In an online experiment, researchers exposed 843 participants, who spoke 25 different languages among them, to iconic vocalizations representing 30 meanings that would have been key for the survival of early humans.
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