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
Revised Nomenclature for Avian Telencephalon and Some Related Brainstem Nuclei
Anton Reiner,David J. Perkel,Laura L. Bruce,Ann B. Butler,András Csillag,Wayne J. Kuenzel,Loreta Medina,George Paxinos,Toru Shimizu,Georg F. Striedter,Martin Wild,Gregory F. Ball,Sarah E. Durand,Onur Gütürkün,Diane W. Lee,Claudio V. Mello,Alice Schade Powers,Stephanie A. White,Gerald E. Hough,Lubica Kubikova,Tom V. Smulders,Kazuhiro Wada,Jennifer Dugas-Ford,Scott Husband,Keiko Yamamoto,Jing Yu,Connie Siang,Erich D. Jarvis +27 more
TL;DR: The standard nomenclature that has been used for many telencephalic and related brainstem structures in birds is reviewed, with a rationale for each name change and evidence for any homologies implied by the new names.
Journal ArticleDOI
Towards a functional neuroanatomy of speech perception
Gregory Hickok,David Poeppel +1 more
TL;DR: It is argued that cortical fields in the posterior-superior temporal lobe, bilaterally, constitute the primary substrate for constructing sound- based representations of speech, and that these sound-based representations interface with different supramodal systems in a task-dependent manner.
Journal ArticleDOI
Foreign-language experience in infancy: Effects of short-term exposure and social interaction on phonetic learning
TL;DR: Between 9 and 10 mo of age, infants show phonetic learning from live, but not prerecorded, exposure to a foreign language, suggesting a learning process that does not require long-term listening and is enhanced by social interaction.
Journal ArticleDOI
From monkey-like action recognition to human language: an evolutionary framework for neurolinguistics.
TL;DR: It is argued that the progression from protosign and protospeech to languages with full-blown syntax and compositional semantics was a historical phenomenon in the development of Homo sapiens, involving few if any further biological changes.
Journal ArticleDOI
Darwin's mistake: Explaining the discontinuity between human and nonhuman minds
TL;DR: It is suggested that recent symbolic-connectionist models of cognition shed new light on the mechanisms that underlie the gap between human and nonhuman minds.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
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Journal ArticleDOI
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Journal ArticleDOI
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