Response to Lieberman on “Monkey vocal tracts are speech-ready”

Abstract

We thank P. Lieberman for his technical comment, and we are pleased that he accepts our data, methods, and results and agrees with our main conclusion: that a macaque’s vocal tract would be able to produce speech sounds if macaques had the required neural control. However, we cannot agree that our findings, which expand the phonetic potential of macaques eightfold relative to that reported in his seminal 1969 paper, in any sense constitute a “replication” of that study or demonstrate the correctness of his earlier conclusions.