New book chapter by Chantal Oderbolz and Martin Meyer about evolutionary origins of prosody
Prosody is a universal, indispensable and yet underinvestigated component of human speech. In this chapter, we argue that linguistic prosody is rooted in evolutionarily conserved sensitivities to slow acoustic modulations that characterize vocalizations across species. We review neurophysiological and developmental evidence demonstrating an intrinsic human bias for processing slowly varying acoustic cues such as fundamental frequency, amplitude, and duration. We situate this bias within a broader evolutionary framework in which the temporal structure of biologically relevant vocal signals aligns with conserved intrinsic neural timescales.
Oderbolz, Chantal & Meyer, Martin. (2026). Evolutionary Origins of Linguistic Prosody. 10.1016/B978-0-323-95504-1.01371-5.