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Singing Birds, Playing Cats, and Babbling Babies: Why Do They Do It?

  • Sverre Sjölander
Published/Copyright: August 22, 2000
Phonetica
From the journal Phonetica Volume 57 Issue 2-4

Abstract

Rarely, animals do what they do because they are aware of the function of the behaviour or its outcome. Instead, they will very often perform behaviour out of context, spontaneously, as play. The impression (strengthened by introspection in the human species) is that they do it because they get some kind of internal reward. Nevertheless, such seemingly meaningless behaviour may have an ultimate function to adjust behavioural programs to the body, to practice, to perfect the execution of the behaviour. If the proximate reason for doing what the animal does may be to attain a pleasurable state, the ultimate, evolutionary reason may still be that increased practice will give some gain in fitness. If one presupposes internal rewarding and punishing systems as intervening factors, it becomes much simpler to explain why birds sing, kittens play or babies babble without any outer reward and out of any functional context, more than needed from a strictly functional view, spontaneously and just for the fun of it.

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Published Online: 2000-08-22
Published in Print: 2000-12-01

© 2000 S. Karger AG, Basel

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Special Section
  2. Title Page
  3. Foreword
  4. Acoustic Patterning of Speech Its Linguistic and Physiological Bases
  5. Investigating Unscripted Speech: Implications for Phonetics and Phonology
  6. Emotive Transforms
  7. The Source-Filter Frame of Prominence
  8. The C/D Model and Prosodic Control of Articulatory Behavior
  9. Diverse Acoustic Cues at Consonantal Landmarks
  10. Perceptual Processing
  11. Modeling and Perception of ‘Gesture Reduction’
  12. General Auditory Processes Contribute to Perceptual Accommodation of Coarticulation
  13. Adaptive Dispersion in Vowel Perception
  14. Language Acquisition as Complex Category Formation
  15. Biology of Communication and Motor Processes
  16. Singing Birds, Playing Cats, and Babbling Babies: Why Do They Do It?
  17. The Phonetic Potential of Nonhuman Vocal Tracts: Comparative Cineradiographic Observations of Vocalizing Animals
  18. Dynamic Simulation of Human Movement Using Large-Scale Models of the Body
  19. En Route to Adult Spoken Language / Language Development
  20. An Embodiment Perspective on the Acquisition of Speech Perception
  21. Speech to Infants as Hyperspeech: Knowledge-Driven Processes in Early Word Recognition
  22. The Construction of a First Phonology
  23. Auditory Constraints on Sound Structures
  24. Searching for an Auditory Description of Vowel Categories
  25. Commentary
  26. Imitation and the Emergence of Segments
  27. Deriving Speech from Nonspeech: A View from Ontogeny
  28. Paper
  29. Developmental Origins of Adult Phonology: The Interplay between Phonetic Emergents and the Evolutionary Adaptations of Sound Patterns
  30. Further Section
  31. Publications Björn Lindblom
  32. Index autorum Vol. 57, 2000
  33. Contents Vol. 57, 2000
https://doi.org/10.1159/000028473

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Special Section
  2. Title Page
  3. Foreword
  4. Acoustic Patterning of Speech Its Linguistic and Physiological Bases
  5. Investigating Unscripted Speech: Implications for Phonetics and Phonology
  6. Emotive Transforms
  7. The Source-Filter Frame of Prominence
  8. The C/D Model and Prosodic Control of Articulatory Behavior
  9. Diverse Acoustic Cues at Consonantal Landmarks
  10. Perceptual Processing
  11. Modeling and Perception of ‘Gesture Reduction’
  12. General Auditory Processes Contribute to Perceptual Accommodation of Coarticulation
  13. Adaptive Dispersion in Vowel Perception
  14. Language Acquisition as Complex Category Formation
  15. Biology of Communication and Motor Processes
  16. Singing Birds, Playing Cats, and Babbling Babies: Why Do They Do It?
  17. The Phonetic Potential of Nonhuman Vocal Tracts: Comparative Cineradiographic Observations of Vocalizing Animals
  18. Dynamic Simulation of Human Movement Using Large-Scale Models of the Body
  19. En Route to Adult Spoken Language / Language Development
  20. An Embodiment Perspective on the Acquisition of Speech Perception
  21. Speech to Infants as Hyperspeech: Knowledge-Driven Processes in Early Word Recognition
  22. The Construction of a First Phonology
  23. Auditory Constraints on Sound Structures
  24. Searching for an Auditory Description of Vowel Categories
  25. Commentary
  26. Imitation and the Emergence of Segments
  27. Deriving Speech from Nonspeech: A View from Ontogeny
  28. Paper
  29. Developmental Origins of Adult Phonology: The Interplay between Phonetic Emergents and the Evolutionary Adaptations of Sound Patterns
  30. Further Section
  31. Publications Björn Lindblom
  32. Index autorum Vol. 57, 2000
  33. Contents Vol. 57, 2000
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