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
Can children with autism recover? If so, how?
Molly Helt,Elizabeth Kelley,Marcel Kinsbourne,Juhi Pandey,Hilary Boorstein,Martha R. Herbert,Deborah Fein +6 more
TL;DR: Evidence that between 3% and 25% of children reportedly lose their ASD diagnosis and enter the normal range of cognitive, adaptive and social skills is reviewed, suggesting possible mechanisms of recovery include normalizing input by forcing attention outward or enriching the environment.
Journal ArticleDOI
Sensory-Motor Interaction in the Primate Auditory Cortex During Self-Initiated Vocalizations
Steven J. Eliades,Xiaoqin Wang +1 more
TL;DR: It is proposed that the suppression of auditory cortical neurons, possibly originating from cortical vocal production centers, acts to increase the dynamic range of cortical responses to vocalization feedback for self monitoring.
Journal ArticleDOI
Brain Imaging of Language Plasticity in Adopted Adults: Can a Second Language Replace the First?
Christophe Pallier,Stanislas Dehaene,Jean-Baptiste Poline,Denis LeBihan,Anne-Marie Argenti,Emmanuel Dupoux,Jacques Mehler +6 more
TL;DR: This article used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging to monitor cortical activations while the Korean adoptees and native French listeners to sentences spoken in Korean, French and other, unknown, foreign languages.
Journal ArticleDOI
A systematic, large-scale study of synaesthesia: implications for the role of early experience in lexical-colour associations
TL;DR: It is suggested that the development of lexical-colour synaesthesia in many cases incorporates early learning experiences common to all individuals, and that the learning of such sequences during an early critical period determines the particular pattern of lexicals-colour links and that this pattern then generalises to other words.
Journal ArticleDOI
Tuning for spectro-temporal modulations as a mechanism for auditory discrimination of natural sounds.
TL;DR: It is demonstrated that ensembles of auditory neurons are tuned to auditory features that enhance the acoustic differences between classes of natural sounds, and among the songs of individual birds.
References
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