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 cortical organization of speech processing
Gregory Hickok,David Poeppel +1 more
TL;DR: A dual-stream model of speech processing is outlined that assumes that the ventral stream is largely bilaterally organized — although there are important computational differences between the left- and right-hemisphere systems — and that the dorsal stream is strongly left- Hemisphere dominant.
Journal ArticleDOI
The faculty of language: what is it, who has it, and how did it evolve?
TL;DR: It is argued that an understanding of the faculty of language requires substantial interdisciplinary cooperation and how current developments in linguistics can be profitably wedded to work in evolutionary biology, anthropology, psychology, and neuroscience is suggested.
Journal ArticleDOI
About sleep's role in memory
Bjoern Rasch,Jan Born,Jan Born +2 more
TL;DR: This review aims to comprehensively cover the field of "sleep and memory" research by providing a historical perspective on concepts and a discussion of more recent key findings.
Journal ArticleDOI
Dorsal and ventral streams: a framework for understanding aspects of the functional anatomy of language.
Gregory Hickok,David Poeppel +1 more
TL;DR: It is shown how damage to different components of this framework can account for the major symptom clusters of the fluent aphasias, and some recent evidence concerning how sentence-level processing might be integrated into the framework is discussed.
Journal ArticleDOI
Early language acquisition: cracking the speech code
TL;DR: New data show that infants use computational strategies to detect the statistical and prosodic patterns in language input, and that this leads to the discovery of phonemes and words.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
Effects of language experience on speech perception: American and Japanese infants’ perception of /ra/ and /la/
Patricia K. Kuhl,Shigeru Kiritani,Toshisada Deguchi,Akiko Hayashi,Erica B. Stevens,Charmaine D. Dugger,Paul Iverson +6 more
TL;DR: This article found that infants begin to ignore phonetic variations that are irrelevant in their native language, with increasing exposure to a particular language, and this effect was observed in infants listening to language during the first year of life.
Anatomical asymmetry as the basis for cerebral dominance
TL;DR: The paper summarizes the findings of striking anatomical asymmetry of the upper surface of the temporal lobe, in an area known to be involved in speech functions, and discusses the implications of these findings.
Journal ArticleDOI
Hormonal influence on language development in physically advanced children
Peggy McCardle,Bruce E. Wilson +1 more
TL;DR: Language function was examined in patients with accelerated maturation caused by conditions with sex hormone elevation, and significant language performance differences were noted between androgen- vs. estrogen-exposed patients, indicating a hormonal effect on language development over time.