The study of non‐human animals, in particular primates, can provide essential insights into language evolution. A critical element of language is vocal production learning, i.e. learning how to produce calls. In contrast to other lineages such as songbirds, vocal production learning of completely new signals is strikingly rare in non‐human primates. An increasing body of research, however, suggests that various species of non‐human primates engage in vocal accommodation and adjust the structure of their calls in response to environmental noise or conspecific vocalizations. To date it is unclear what role vocal accommodation may have played in language evolution, in particular because it summarizes a variety of heterogeneous phenomena which are potentially achieved by different mechanisms. In contrast to non‐human primates, accommodation research in humans has a long tradition in psychology and linguistics. Based on theoretical models from these research traditions, we provide a new framework which allows comparing instances of accommodation across species, and studying them according to their underlying mechanism and ultimate biological function. We found that at the mechanistic level, many cases of accommodation can be explained with an automatic perception–production link, but some instances arguably require higher levels of vocal control. Functionally, both human and non‐human primates use social accommodation to signal social closeness or social distance to a partner or social group. Together, this indicates that not only some vocal control, but also the communicative function of vocal accommodation to signal social closeness and distance must have evolved prior to the emergence of language, rather than being the result of it. Vocal accommodation as found in other primates has thus endowed our ancestors with pre‐adaptations that may have paved the way for language evolution.

中文翻译：

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人类和其他灵长类动物声音调节的功能和机制

对非人类动物，特别是灵长类动物的研究，可以为语言进化提供重要的见解。语言的一个关键要素是发声学习，即学习如何发声。与鸣禽等其他谱系相比，对全新信号的发声学习在非人类灵长类动物中极为罕见。然而，越来越多的研究表明，各种非人类灵长类动物都会进行声音调节，并根据环境噪音或同种发声来调整它们的叫声结构。迄今为止，尚不清楚声音调节在语言进化中可能发挥了什么作用，特别是因为它总结了各种可能通过不同机制实现的异质现象。与非人类灵长类动物相比，人类适应研究在心理学和语言学方面有着悠久的传统。基于这些研究传统的理论模型，我们提供了一个新的框架，允许比较不同物种的适应实例，并根据它们的潜在机制和最终生物功能进行研究。我们发现，在机械层面，许多适应情况可以用自动感知-生产链接来解释，但有些情况可以说需要更高水平的声音控制。从功能上讲，人类和非人类灵长类动物都使用社会适应来表示与伴侣或社会群体的社会亲近或社会距离。总之，这表明不仅一些声音控制，但声音调节的交际功能也必须在语言出现之前就已经进化，而不是语言出现的结果。因此，在其他灵长类动物中发现的声音调节赋予我们的祖先预先适应能力，这可能为语言进化铺平了道路。