Preprint version of: Vocal Tract-related Acoustic Cues Across Human and Non-Human Vocal Signals. pp.1-17. In RETI SAPERI LINGUAGGI - ISSN:2279-7777 vol. 1 (1) Marco Gamba marco.gamba@unito.it Vocal tract-related cues across human and nonhuman signals Marco Gamba Università di Torino, Dipartimento di Scienze della Vita e Biologia dei Sistemi, Via Accademia Albertina 13, 10123 Torino, Italia. Email: marco.gamba@unito.it Abstract I provide an overview of the studies on human speech and animal communication, showing that the formants, or vocal tract resonances, are crucial acoustic features of human and nonhuman vocalizations. The formants of nonhuman mammals possess the potential to provide conspecifics with cues to emitter’s body size, species and individual identity. The findings reviewed in this paper suggest that human phonetic abilities may have evolved separately from formant perception and possibly at a later stage, as the widespread use of formants in animal communication would indicate. Introduction brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk provided by Institutional Research Information System University of Turin