Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We report observations of Hudson Bay wolves (Canis lupus hudsonicus) producing howl-like calls accompanied by visible dynamic tongue movements. We show that the wolves actively changed the shape of their vocal tract through apical tongue gestures (i.e., the tongue tip arches anteriorly toward the palate), a phenomenon that changes vowel quality in human speech. A combination of video content analysis and articulatory modeling indicates that the apical lingual gesture changes vocal-tract resonances along the close--open dimension, producing a consistent perceptual shift from a schwa-like quality toward a close central rounded quality. These findings provide evidence that a non-primate animal can perform dynamic lingual filtering during vocal production.