M2 Internship – Human nonverbal vocalisations across cultures

This project aims to gain new insights about the diversity of non-verbal vocalisations (like scream, cries and laughter) across cultures, their acoustic forms and functions from an evolutionary perspective, and ultimately the role that they might have in the forms of emotional interjections (like wow! ouch!).
There are more than 7000 languages in the world, but even if the potential space for all these different sound systems of all these languages is enormous, any given language makes use of only a small portion of all these possible sounds. Compared to speech, nonverbal vocal signals can exploit a much broader acoustic soundscape due to the lack of linguistic rules. Despite their ubiquity in human social communication and their ostensible roots in animal affective calls, human non-verbal vocalisations such as laughter, screams and moans remain remarkably understudied in our species, especially across cultures. It has been shown that people can correctly classify several emotions from nonverbal vocalisations even if they are produced by speakers from a different culture. However, preliminary studies point to a potential in-group advantage in which accuracy increases as a function of cultural similarity between speaker and listener. If so, does it mean that the acoustic structure of simulated non-verbal vocalisations, at least to some degree, may differ across cultures? Among all different factors that may reduce this in-group advantage, we hypothesise that the phylogenetic language and geographic proximity between cultures may play an important role.

More information on the link below.