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You beat me, Mark!

Scientists say Koshik, an Asian elephant at a South Korean zoo, can imitate human speech, saying five Korean words readily understood by people who speak the language. The male elephant invented an unusual method of sound production that involves putting his trunk in his mouth and manipulating his vocal tract. Vocal mimicry is not a common behavior of mammals (unless you count humans). Researchers postulate Koshik was apparently so driven to imitate sounds that he invented the method of putting his trunk in his mouth and moving it around. They believe that he may have done this to bond with his trainers, as he was deprived of elephant companionship during a critical period of his childhood and spent years with humans as his only social contact. A video of Koshik with his trainer is embedded in the article.

Researchers at Harvard University have found that humans aren't the only ones who can groove to a beat - some other species can dance, too. The capability was previously believed to be specific to humans. The research team found that only species with the capacity for vocal mimicry, that is, copying sound, seem capable of beat induction, the ability to discern the beat in music. Beat induction also enables such actions as clapping, making music together and dancing to a rhythm. The data suggests that some of the brain mechanisms needed for human dance may have originally evolved to allow us to imitate sound.

Employees carrying out an insider attack at work can be identified from the language they use in emails, according to psychologists. The Lancaster University study found that an analysis of the email language of employees within an office environment managed to identify 80 to 90 per cent of those actively stealing confidential information and passing it to a provocateur. Their analysis found that the attackers were much more self-focused, using words like "me," "my" and "I" and they used more negative language compared with typical co-workers. They also found that employees conducting an insider attack reduced the extent to which they mimicked the language of their co-workers. This reduction in mimicry, which suggests an inadvertent social distancing by the attackers, increased over time, such that by the end of simulation, it was possible for the researchers to use the combined metrics to identify 92.6% of insiders.

Noc was a Beluga whale who learned to speak English (yes, "speak"). This article includes some discussion of mimicry vs. communication.

This article gives a nice overview of how different animals can utilize vocalizations in meaningful ways (vocal mimicry), a behavior that's the precursor to human speech and language.

In April 2010, Adriano Lameira set up his video camera in front of an enclosure at Cologne Zoo in Germany. Inside was an orangutan called Tilda. There was a rumour that Tilda could whistle like a human, and Lameira, of Amsterdam University in the Netherlands, was keen to capture it on camera. The results of this experiment were shocking and led to the question "can animals talk like humans?"

Almost every language on the planet includes words that sound like the things they describe. Crash, yawn, glug… speech is just full of these onomatopoeias. And because they have their root in real things they're often easy to identify. Even a non-native speaker might recognise the Hindi "achhee" (a sneeze) or the Indonesian "gluk" (glug). Because these onomatopoeias are so widely encountered, easy to pick up, and convey information might they be the first form of language? That's the argument presented in a recent paper published in Animal Cognition. It points out that our ancestors would have begun encountering more and more noises that we could repeat. Tool use/ manufacture in particular, with its smashes and crashes, would be a prime source of onomatopoeias. Mimicking these sounds could have allowed early humans to "talk" about the objects; describing goals, methods, and objects. Might handing someone a rock and going "smash" been a way to ask them to make a tool? Perhaps different noises could even refer to different tools. Humans are good at extracting information from mimicked sounds. These sounds also trigger "mirror neurons" - parts of the brain that fire when we observe other people doing something - allowing us to repeat those actions. Seeing someone hold a rock a certain way and saying "smash" could have helped our ancestors teach the proper way to smash. But the biggest benefit would be the fact that you can communicate about these objects without seeing them. Having a sound for a tool would allow you to ask someone for it, even if they didn't have it on them. Given these advantages, it's easy to imagine how evolution would have favoured people who mimicked noises. Over time, this would have driven the development of more and more complex communication; until language as we recognise it emerged. Following this narrative, you can see (or maybe hear) how an a human ancestor with almost no language capability gradual

Words formed from a sound and intended to imitate that sound-what linguists refer to as onomatopoeia-fluctuate around the world even when the underlying sound is roughly the same in each place. And the thing about it is, we don't really understand why this fluctuation occurs. It has something to do with the alchemy of humans in different times and places striving to mimic noises in the world around them, and to incorporate this mimicry into distinct linguistic systems and cultural contexts. Some have hypothesized over the years that language originated with the imitation of natural sounds-a notion sometimes referred to as the "bow-wow theory." But whatever the answer to this question, onomatopoeia explains only a sliver of the words we use. The article goes on to share some fun collections of onomatopoeia.

Emotional contagion is the phenomenon of "catching" other people's emotions and moods. According to Elaine Hatfield, a psychology professor at the University of Hawaii, humans are hard-wired "to automatically mimic and synchronize facial expressions, vocalizations, postures, and movements with those of another person and, consequently, to converge emotionally." Primitive emotional contagion is a basic building block of human interaction. It helps us coordinate and synchronize with others, empathize with them, and read their minds-all critical survival skills. When we mimic, the body gets feedback about the expressions we've taken on; we then feel what the other person is feeling. Gary Slutkin, a physician, epidemiologist, and founder and CEO of the nonprofit Cure Violence, says that emotional contagion, specifically anger and violence, springs from four mechanisms involving the brain: 1. Engagement of the cortical pathways for copying, a behavior related to mimicry. The most contagious behaviors are the most emotionally engaging, as well as the ones carried out by the people who are most relevant to you. 2. Activation of the brain's dopamine system, which works in anticipation of a reward. "Activation of that system puts you down a pathway toward what is important socially and for survival," he says. If you anticipate being rewarded for responding to someone with anger or violence, you are more likely to get on that behavioral track. 3. The brain's pain centers activate from veering off or being shut out from getting a reward. "A sense of I can't stand it lights up in the context of disapproval." 4. Serious injuries or abuse cause the limbic system and amygdala in the lower brain to become hyperreactive. "This causes you to be less in control, which accelerates violent behavior," Slutkin says. It also makes you more likely to get angry and be quick to react. "Then there's hostile attribution, another part of what happens with the limbic sy