Chimp accents develop postnatally

A new PLOS One study compared 30 infant and juvenile chimpanzees and found that juveniles—but not infants—show acoustic variation in laughs, grunts and other social vocalizations, indicating accents emerge during maturation rather than at birth. Whimpers, which serve an alarm/location function, were similar across ages, suggesting function constrains vocal plasticity. — If vocal dialects in chimps are socially learned during development, cultural transmission of vocal identity predates humans and informs debates on language origins, social identity signaling, and the evolutionary prerequisites for human dialects.