Journal ArticleDOI
BIRDSONG AND HUMAN SPEECH: Common Themes and Mechanisms
TLDR
Human speech and birdsong have numerous parallels, with striking similarities in how sensory experience is internalized and used to shape vocal outputs, and how learning is enhanced during a critical period of development.Abstract:
Human speech and birdsong have numerous parallels. Both humans and songbirds learn their complex vocalizations early in life, exhibiting a strong dependence on hearing the adults they will imitate, as well as themselves as they practice, and a waning of this dependence as they mature. Innate predispositions for perceiving and learning the correct sounds exist in both groups, although more evidence of innate descriptions of species-specific signals exists in songbirds, where numerous species of vocal learners have been compared. Humans also share with songbirds an early phase of learning that is primarily perceptual, which then serves to guide later vocal production. Both humans and songbirds have evolved a complex hierarchy of specialized forebrain areas in which motor and auditory centers interact closely, and which control the lower vocal motor areas also found in nonlearners. In both these vocal learners, however, how auditory feedback of self is processed in these brain areas is surprisingly unclear. Finally, humans and songbirds have similar critical periods for vocal learning, with a much greater ability to learn early in life. In both groups, the capacity for late vocal learning may be decreased by the act of learning itself, as well as by biological factors such as the hormones of puberty. Although some features of birdsong and speech are clearly not analogous, such as the capacity of language for meaning, abstraction, and flexible associations, there are striking similarities in how sensory experience is internalized and used to shape vocal outputs, and how learning is enhanced during a critical period of development. Similar neural mechanisms may therefore be involved.read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
The precedence of syntax in the rapid emergence of human language in evolution as defined by the integration hypothesis
TL;DR: It is argued that a full-fledged combinatorial operation Merge triggered the integration of two pre-adapted systems, giving rise to a fully developed language, going against the gradualist view that language has undergone a series of gradual changes.
Journal ArticleDOI
Manipulation of a central auditory representation shapes learned vocal output.
Huimeng Lei,Richard Mooney +1 more
TL;DR: Using singing-triggered microstimulation and chronic recording methods in the singing zebra finch, a small songbird that relies on auditory feedback to learn and maintain its species-typical vocalizations, these questions are addressed.
Journal ArticleDOI
A potential neural substrate for processing functional classes of complex acoustic signals.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors found that neurons in the caudo-medial nidopallium of the European starling show differential neuronal responses to the ethologically defined classes of songs, both in the number of neurons responding and in the response magnitude of these neurons.
Journal ArticleDOI
Physiology of neuronal subtypes in the respiratory-vocal integration nucleus retroamigualis of the male zebra finch
TL;DR: Results indicate that electrically distinct cell types exist in RAm, affording physiological heterogeneity that may play an important role in respiratory-vocal signaling.
Journal ArticleDOI
Early Language Learning and the Social Brain
TL;DR: New data are being brought to bear from studies that employ magnetoencephalograph (MEG), electroencephalographs (EEG), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) studies on young children that examine the patterns of association between brain and behavioral measures.
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