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
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
Mechanisms Underlying Directional Selectivity for Frequency-Modulated Sweeps in the Inferior Colliculus Revealed by In Vivo Whole-Cell Recordings
TL;DR: The findings suggest that some IC cells use a rate code in their inputs rather than a time code and that highly selective discharge properties can be created by only minor adjustments in the synaptic strengths evoked by different signals.
Journal ArticleDOI
The neurobiology of innate, volitional and learned vocalizations in mammals and birds.
Andreas Nieder,Richard Mooney +1 more
TL;DR: This review compares and contrasts the neural mechanisms underlying innate, volitional and learned vocalizations, with an emphasis on functional studies in primates, rodents and songbirds.
Journal ArticleDOI
The activation of birdsong by testosterone: multiple sites of action and role of ascending catecholamine projections.
TL;DR: Chemical lesioning studies suggest that noradrenergic projections to the song system are involved in the latency to produce song and the ability to discriminate conspecific from heterospecific song.
Journal ArticleDOI
Generating variable birdsong syllable sequences with branching chain networks in avian premotor nucleus HVC.
TL;DR: This work proposes that variable syllable sequences are generated through spike propagations in a network in HVC in which the syllable-encoding chain networks are connected into a branching chain pattern.
Journal ArticleDOI
A songbird forebrain area potentially involved in auditory discrimination and memory formation
Raphael Pinaud,Thomas A. Terleph +1 more
TL;DR: Evidence that suggests that NCM may be a site of auditory memory formation and/or storage is discussed, which may underlie long-term modifications in the functional performance of NCM and constitute a potential neural substrate for auditory discrimination.
References
More filters
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].
Book
Biological Foundations of Language
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
Perception of the speech code.
Book
Rules and Representations
TL;DR: Hornstein this article discusses the Biological Basis of Language Capacities and Language and Unconscious Knowledge Notes Index (LUCI) for language and unconscious knowledge in the context of natural language processing.