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
A songbird animal model for dissecting the genetic bases of autism spectrum disorder
TL;DR: Recent advances are highlighted in using the songbird model to probe the cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying the formation and function of neural circuitry for birdsong and, by analogy, human language, with the ultimate goal of identifying any shared or human unique biological pathways underscoring language development and its disruption in ASD.
Journal ArticleDOI
The necessity of connection structures in neural models of variable binding
TL;DR: It is shown that the label (synchrony) based models analyzed by Feldman are in fact examples of connectivity based models, which are the only type of models that can produce behavior that resembles a small-world network, as found in the brain.
Journal ArticleDOI
Temporal structure of mouse courtship vocalizations facilitates syllable labeling.
TL;DR: An algorithm is derived that improves syllable clustering based on predictive power and sequence statistics that utilizes sequence statistics to improve the clustering of individual USVs with respect to the underlying sequence structure.
Archiving nature’s heartbeat using smart phones
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present the design and development of a sensor network based on smart phones to automatically collect and analyse acoustic and visual data for environmental monitoring purposes, where software tools can be developed to allow data to be collected, partially processed and sent to a remote server over the network for storage and further processing.
Journal ArticleDOI
Adult Neurogenesis in the Songbird: Region-Specific Contributions of New Neurons to Behavioral Plasticity and Stability
TL;DR: A review examines the differences between learning-based and activity-based retention of new neurons and explores the potential contributions of new neuron to behavioral stability in the song motor production pathway.
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Journal ArticleDOI
Hearing lips and seeing voices
Harry McGurk,John Macdonald +1 more
TL;DR: The study reported here demonstrates a previously unrecognised influence of vision upon speech perception, on being shown a film of a young woman's talking head in which repeated utterances of the syllable [ba] had been dubbed on to lip movements for [ga].
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TL;DR: The coming of language occurs at about the same age in every healthy child throughout the world as mentioned in this paper, strongly supporting the concept that genetically determined processes of maturation, rather than env...
Journal ArticleDOI
Statistical Learning by 8-Month-Old Infants
TL;DR: The present study shows that a fundamental task of language acquisition, segmentation of words from fluent speech, can be accomplished by 8-month-old infants based solely on the statistical relationships between neighboring speech sounds.
Journal ArticleDOI
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