Form and Function in Human Pain Vocalisations
Résumé
Humans produce nonverbal vocalisations such as laughter, cries, and screams in a wide range of contexts. Yet despite their cross-cultural universality in social communication and clear parallels with the affective vocalisations of other mammals, human nonverbal vocalisations remain understudied relative to speech. Using acoustic analysis and playback experiments, we examine the communicative functions of pain vocalisations produced by humans in both genuine and mocked contexts. We show that both spontaneous and volitional pain vocalisations follow a form-function design, wherein acoustic features (form) appear to reflect their evolved function. We further show that listeners are highly sensitive to this meaningful acoustic variation. This research provides compelling evidence that human nonverbal vocalisations, much like those of other animals, have been shaped by selection to communicate, and sometimes exaggerate, biologically and socially relevant information.