Monday, April 05, 2021

Are there animals that "stutter"?

My guess is that there should be some kind of symbolic content in the communication, as in patterns of sounds (like words) having a "meaning" as opposed to being purely emotive sounds (like a bark). And there needs to be a specific thought formulation that "plans" on the "word" being produced. It's possible that whales, dolphins, and some primates are at that level. If so, it's not inconceivable that they might experience stuttering. This is pure conjecture on my part. It's actually an interesting question. At some point while at NASA I proposed building a speech producing mechanism that actually simulated the coordination of human speech. My idea was to be able to tweak parameters to make the system "stutter". I tried to sell the idea as a form of human-like robotic speech.

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