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We humans are pretty good at communicating with sounds other than words. But how much of this is hard-wired, and how much do we pick up from others?

To find out, researchers recorded the nonverbal sounds of people born deaf, as they responded to a range of positive and negative emotions. The idea being that if certain sounds are learned, deaf people wouldn't know how to make them.

Then they played back those recordings¹ for a group of hearing individuals, to see if they could decipher the emotion behind each sound. They guessed correctly more than chance would predict—deaf people’s sounds of amusement and relief were pretty obvious, which suggests we may be born primed to laugh or sigh.

But the listeners had a tough time with these two. Those are both expressions of triumph. Here’s a hearing person’s.

So the researchers say certain nonverbal sounds may require experience to learn—just as in language. They'll present the findings at a meeting of the Acoustical² Society of America.

Their theory fits nicely with a previous study, which found that shouts of triumph vary from culture to culture. Maybe that explains why some people can’t stand the vuvuzela.

Thanks for the minute. For Scientific American’s 60-Second Science, I’m Christopher Intagliata.