Targets for a comparative neurobiology of language

Frontiers in Evolutionary Neuroscience

Volumn 4, Issue APR, 2012, Pages

  Kiggins, Justin T ^a   Comins, Jordan A ^b   Gentner, Timothy Q ^a,b,c  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

^c UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

comparative neurobiology; Language; Songbirds

Indexed keywords

EID: 84874196072     PISSN: None     EISSN: 1663070X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3389/fnevo.2012.00006     Document Type: Review

References (126)

1. Abe, K., and Watanabe, D. (2011) Song- birds possess the spontaneous ability to discriminate syntactic rules. Nat. Neurosci. 14: 1067-1074.
2. Abla, D., Katahira, K., and Okanoya, K. (2008) On-line assessment of statis- tical learning by event-related poten- tials. J. Cogn. Neurosci. 20: 952-964.
3. Asaad,W. F., Rainer, G., and Miller, E. K. (2000) Task-specific neural activity in the primate prefrontal cortex. J. Neurophysiol. 84: 451-459.
4. Balleine, B. W., Garner, C., Gonzalez, F., and Dickinson, A. (1995) Moti- vational control of heterogeneous instrumental chains. J. Exp. Psychol. Anim. Behav. Process. 21: 203-217.
5. Beckers, G. J. L., Bolhuis, J. J., Okanoya, K., and Berwick, R. C. (2012) Birdsong neurolinguistics: songbird context-free grammar claim is pre- mature. Neuroreport 23: 139-145.
6. Berwick, R., Okanoya, K., Beckers, G., and Bolhuis, J. (2011) Songs to syntax: the linguistics of birdsong. Trends Cogn. Sci. (Regul. Ed.)
7. Blaisdell, A. P., and Cook, R. G. (2005) Two-item same-different concept learning in pigeons. Anim. Learn. Behav. 33: 67-77.
8. Bovet, D., and Vauclair, J. (2001) Judgment of conceptual identity in monkeys. Psychon. Bull. Rev. 8, 470-475.
9. Brainard, M. S., and Doupe,A. J. (2002) What songbirds teach us about learning. Nature 417: 351-358.
10. Bunge, S. A., Kahn, I., Wallis, J. D., Miller, E. K., and Wagner, A. D. (2003) Neural circuits subserving the retrieval and maintenance of abstract rules. J. Neurophysiol. 90: 3419-3428.
11. Chen, S., Swartz, K. B., and Terrace, H. S. (1997) Knowledge of the origi- nal position of list items in rhesus monkeys. Psychol. Sci. 8, 80-86.
12. Comins,J. A.,and Gentner,T. Q. (2010) Working memory for patterned sequences of auditory objects in a songbird. Cognition 117: 38-53.
13. D'Amato, M. R., and Colombo, M. (1988) Representation of serial order in monkeys (Cebus apella) J. Exp. Psychol. Anim. Behav. Process. 14: 131-139.
14. Drew, P. J., and Abbott, L. F. (2003) Model of song selectivity and sequence generation in area HVc of the songbird. J. Neurophysiol. 89: 2697-2706.
15. Eens, M., Pinxten, R., and Verheyen, R. F. (1988) Temporal and sequential organisation of song bouts in the starling. Ardea 77: 75-86.
16. Endress, A. D., Cahill, D., Block, S., Watumull, J., and Hauser, M. D. (2009a) Evidence of an evolutionary precursor to human language affixation in a non- human primate. Biol. Lett. 5: 749-751.
17. Endress, A. D., Nespor, M., and Mehler, J. (2009b) Perceptual and memory constraints on language acquisition. Trends Cogn. Sci. (Regul. Ed.) 13: 348-353.
18. Endress, A. D., Carden, S., Ver-sace, E., and Hauser, M. D. (2010) The apes' edge: posi- tional learning in chimpanzees and humans. Anim. Cogn. 13: 483-495.
19. Endress, A. D., and Hauser, M. D. (2010) Word segmentation with universal prosodic cues. Cogn. Psy- chol. 61: 177-199.
20. Endress, A. D., Scholl, B. J., and Mehler, J. (2005) The role of salience in the extraction of algebraic rules. J. Exp. Psychol. Gen. 134: 406.
21. Fagot, J., Wasserman, E. A., and Young, M. E. (2001) Discriminating the relation between relations: the role of entropy in abstract conceptual- ization by baboons (Papio papio) and humans (Homo sapiens) J. Exp. Psychol. Anim. Behav. Process. 27: 316-328.
22. Fitch, W. T., and Hauser, M. D. (2004) Computational constraints on syn- tactic processing in a nonhuman primate. Science 303: 377-380.
23. Fitch, W. T., Hauser, M. D., and Chom-sky, N. (2005) The evolution of the language faculty: clarifications and implications. Cognition 97: 179-210; discussion 211-225.
24. Friederici, A. D. (2011) The brain basis of language processing: from struc- ture to function. Physiol. Rev. 91: 1357-1392.
25. Friederici, A. D., Friedrich, M., and Christophe, A. (2007) Brain responses in 4-month-old infants are already language specific. Curr. Biol. 17: 1208-1211.
26. Fuster, J. M. (2009) Cortex and mem- ory: emergence of a new paradigm. J. Cogn. Neurosci. 21: 2047-2072.
27. Fuster, J. M., and Alexander, G. E. (1971) Neuron activity related to short-term memory. Science 173: 652-654.
28. Gentner, T. Q. (2008) Temporal scales of auditory objects underlying bird- song vocal recognition. J.Acoust. Soc. Am. 124: 1350-1359.
29. Gentner, T. Q., Fenn, K. M., Mar- goliash, D., and Nusbaum, H. C. (2006) Recursive syntactic pattern learning by songbirds. Nature 440: 1204-1207.
30. Gentner, T. Q., and Hulse, S. H. (1998) Perceptual mechanisms for individ- ual vocal recognition in European starlings, Sturnus vulgaris. Anim. Behav. 56: 579-594.
31. Gentner, T. Q., Hulse, S. H., Bentley, G. E., and Ball, G. F. (2000) Individ- ual vocal recognition and the effect of partial lesions to HVc on dis- crimination, learning, and catego- rization of conspecific song in adult songbirds. J. Neurobiol. 42, 117-133.
32. Gentner, T. Q., Hulse, S. H., Duffy, D., and Ball, G. F. (2001) Response biases in auditory forebrain regions of female songbirds following expo- sure to sexually relevant variation in male song. J. Neurobiol. 46: 48-58.
33. Gentner, T. Q., and Margoliash, D. (2003) Neuronal populations and single cells representing learned auditory objects. Nature 424: 669-674.
34. Gill, P., Woolley, S. M. N., Fremouw, T., and Theunissen, F. E. (2008) What's that sound? Auditory area CLM encodes stimulus surprise, not intensity or intensity changes. J. Neurophysiol. 99: 2809-2820.
35. Gomez, R. L., and Gerken, L. (1999) Artificial grammar learning by 1- year-olds leads to specific and abstract knowledge. Cognition 70: 109-135.
36. Goodale,M. A.,and Milner,A D. (1992) Separate visual pathways for percep- tion and action. Trends Neurosci. 15: 20-25.
37. Güntürkün, O. (2011) The convergent evolution of neural substrates for cognition. Psychol. Res. 76: 212-219.
38. Hauser, M. D., Chomsky, N., and Fitch, W. T. (2002) The faculty of lan- guage: what is it, who has it, and how did it evolve? Science 298, 1569-1579.
39. Hauser, M. D., and Glynn, D. (2009) Can free-ranging rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) extract artificially created rules comprised of natural vocalizations? J. Comp. Psychol. 123: 161-167.
40. Henson, R., Burgess, N., and Frith, C. (2000) Recoding, storage, rehearsal and grouping in verbal short-term memory: an fMRI study. Neuropsy- chologia 38, 426-440.
41. Henson, R. N. A., Norris, D. G., Page, M. P. A., and Baddeley, A. D. (1996) Unchained memory: error patterns rule out chaining models of imme- diate serial recall. Q. J. Exp. Psychol. A 49: 80-115.
42. Herbranson, W. T., and Shimp, C. P. (2003) "Artificial grammar learn- ing" in pigeons: a preliminary analy- sis. Anim. Learn. Behav. 31: 98-106.
43. Herbranson, W. T., and Shimp, C. P. (2008) Artificial grammar learn- ing in pigeons. Learn. Behav. 36: 116-137.
44. Herman, L. M., and Gordon, J. A. (1974) Auditory delayed matching in the bottlenose dolphin. J. Exp. Anal. Behav. 21: 19-26.
45. Herman, L. M., Kuczaj, S. A., and Holder, M. D. (1993) Responses to anomalous gestural sequences by a language-trained dolphin: evidence for processing of semantic relations and syntactic information. J. Exp. Psychol. Gen. 122, 184-194.
46. Hickok, G., and Poeppel, D. (2007) The cortical organization of speech processing. Nat. Rev. Neurosci. 8, 393-402.
47. Holt, L. L., and Lotto, A. J. (2008) Speech perception within an auditory cognitive science frame- work. Curr.Dir.Psychol.Sci.17: 42-46.
48. Hoshi, E., Shima, K., and Tanji, J. (1998) Task-dependent selec- tivity of movement-related neu- ronal activity in the primate pre- frontal cortex. J. Neurophysiol. 80: 3392-3397.
49. House, B. J., Brown, A. L., and Scott, M. S. (1974) Children's discrimina- tion learning based on identity or difference. Adv. Child. Dev. Behav. 9: 1-45.
50. Iversen, J. R., Patel, A. D., and Ohgushi, K. (2008) Perception of rhyth- mic grouping depends on auditory experience. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 124: 2263-2271.
51. Jackendoff, R., and Pinker, S. (2005) The nature of the language fac- ulty and its implications for evo- lution of language (Reply to Fitch, Hauser, and Chomsky) Cognition 97: 211-225.
52. Jeanne, J. M., Thompson, J. V., Sharpee, T. O., and Gentner, T. Q. (2011) Emergence of learned categorical representations within an auditory forebrain circuit. J. Neurosci. 31: 2595-2606.
53. Jusczyk, P. (1999) How infants begin to extract words from speech. Trends Cogn. Sci. (Regul. Ed.) 3: 323-328.
54. Kastak, D., and Schusterman, R. J. (1994) Transfer of visual iden- tity matching-to-sample in two cal- ifornia sea lions (Zalophus califor- nianus) Anim. Learn. Behav. 22, 427-435.
55. Katz, J. S., and Wright, A. A. (2006) Same/different abstract-concept learning by pigeons. J. Exp. Psychol. Anim. Behav. Process. 32, 80-86.
56. Kelley, D. B., and Nottebohm, F. (1979) Projections of a telencephalic audi- tory nucleus-field L-in the canary. J. Comp. Neurol. 183: 455-469.
57. Kluender,K. R.,Diehl,R. L.,and Killeen, P. R. (1987) Japanese quail can learn phonetic categories. Science 237: 1195-1197.
58. Kuhl, P., and Miller, J. (1975) Speech perception by the chinchilla: voiced- voiceless distinction in alveolar plosive consonants. Science 190: 69-72.
59. Lashley, K. (1951) "The problem of serial order in behavior," in Cere- bral Mechanisms in Behavior,Vol. 26: ed. L. A. Jeffress (New York: Wiley), 112-137.
60. Lewicki, M. S., and Arthur, B. J. (1996) Hierarchical organization of audi- tory temporal context sensitivity. J. Neurosci. 16: 6987-6998.
61. Lewicki, M. S., and Konishi, M. (1995) Mechanisms underlying the sensi- tivity of songbird forebrain neurons to temporal order. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 92, 5582-5586.
62. Liberman, A. M., Cooper, F. S., Shankweiler, D. P., and Studdert- Kennedy, M. (1967) Perception of the speech code. Psychol. Rev. 74: 431.
63. Lipkind, D., and Tchernichovski, O. (2011) Quantification of develop- mental birdsong learning from the subsyllabic scale to cultural evolu- tion. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 108(Suppl. 3), 15572-15579.
64. Marcus, G., Vijayan, S., and Rao, S. B. (1999) Rule learning by seven- month-old infants. Science 283: 77-80.
65. Marcus, G. F., Fernandes, K. J., and Johnson, S. P. (2007) Infant rule learning facilitated by speech. Psychol. Sci. 18, 387-391.
66. Margoliash, D. (1983) Acoustic para- meters underlying the responses of song-specific neurons in the white- crowned sparrow. J. Neurosci. 3: 1039-1057.
67. Margoliash, D. (1986) Preference for autogenous song by auditory neu- rons in a song system nucleus of the white-crowned sparrow. J. Neurosci. 6: 1643-1661.
68. Margoliash, D., and Fortune, S. (1992) Temporal and harmonic combination-sensitive finch ' s HVc neurons in the zebra. J. Neurosci. 12, 4309-4326.
69. Margoliash, D., and Nusbaum, H. C. (2009) Language: the perspective from organismal biology. Trends Cogn. Sci. (Regul. Ed.) 13: 505-510.
70. Marshuetz, C., Smith, E. E., Jonides, J., Degutis, J., and Chenevert, T. L. (2000) Order information in work- ing memory: fMRI evidence for parietal and prefrontal mechanisms. J. Cogn. Neurosci. 12, 130-144.
71. Maye, J., Werker, J. F., and Gerken, L. (2002) Infant sensitivity to distrib- utional information can affect pho- netic discrimination. Cognition 82, B101-B111.
72. McNealy, K., Mazziotta, J. C., and Dapretto, M. (2010) The neural basis of speech parsing in children and adults. Dev. Sci. 13: 385-406.
73. Meliza, C. D., Chi, Z., and Margoliash, D. (2010) Representations of con- specific song by starling secondary forebrain auditory neurons: toward a hierarchical framework. J. Neurophysiol. 103: 1195-1208.
74. Mello, C. V., and Ribeiro, S. (1998) ZENK protein regulation by song in the brain of songbirds. J. Comp. Neurol. 393: 426-438.
75. Mercado, E., Killebrew, D. A., Pack, A. A., Mácha, I. V., and Herman, L. M. (2000) Generalization of "same-different" classification abil- ities in bottlenosed dolphins. Behav. Processes 50: 79-94.
76. Miller, C. T., and Bee, M. A. (2012) Receiver psychology turns 20: is it time for a broader approach? Anim. Behav. 83: 331-343.
77. Miller, E. (2007) "The prefrontal cor- tex: categories, concepts, and cogni- tive control," in Memories: Molecules and Circuits, eds B. Bontempi, A. J. Silva, and Y. Christen (Heidelberg: Springer), 137-154.
78. Milner, A. D., and Goodale, M. A. (2008) Two visual systems re-viewed. Neuropsychologia 46: 774-85.
79. Milner,B. (1982) Some cognitive effects of frontal-lobe lesions in man. Phi- los. Trans. R. Soc. B Biol. Sci. 298, 211-226.
80. Mishkin, M., Prockop, E. S., and Rosvold, H. E. (1962) One-trial object-discrimination learning in monkeys with frontal lesions. J. Comp. Physiol. Psychol. 55: 178-181.
81. Miyawaki, K., Jenkins, J. J., Strange, W., Liberman, A. M., Verbrugge, R., and Fujimura, O. (1975) An effect of linguistic experience- the discrimi- nation of [r] and [l] by native speak- ers of Japanese and English. Atten. Percept. Psychophys. 18, 331-340.
82. Murphy, R. A., Mondragón, E., and Murphy, V. A. (2008) Rule learning by rats. Science 319: 1849-1851.
83. Murphy, R. A., Mondragón, E., Mur- phy, V. A., and Fouquet, N. (2004) Serial order of conditional stimuli as a discriminative cue for Pavlov- ian conditioning. Behav. Processes 67: 303-311.
84. Nelson, D. A., and Marler, P. (1989) Categorical perception of a natural stimulus continuum: birdsong. Sci-ence 244: 976-978.
85. Nishikawa, J., Okada, M., and Okanoya, K. (2008) Population coding of song element sequence in the Bengalese finch HVC. Eur. J. Neurosci. 27: 3273-3283.
86. Oden, D. L., Thompson, R. K., and Premack, D. (1988) Spontaneous transfer of matching by infant chim- panzees (Pan troglodytes) J. Exp. Psychol. Anim. Behav. Process. 14: 140-145.
87. Ohms,V. R., Gill, A., Van Heijningen, C. A. A., Beckers, G. J. L., and ten Cate, C. (2010) Zebra finches exhibit speaker-independent phonetic per- ception of human speech. Proc. Biol. Sci. 277: 1003-1009.
88. Penn, D. C., Holyoak, K. J., and Povinelli, D. J. (2008) Darwin's mistake: explaining the discontinu- ity between human and nonhuman minds. Behav. Brain Sci. 31: 109-30; discussion 130-178.
89. Pepperberg, I. M. (1987) Acquisition of the same/different concept by an African Grey parrot (Psittacus erithacus): learning with respect to categories of color,shape,and mater-ial. Anim. Learn. Behav. 15: 423-432.
90. Pinker, S., and Jackendoff, R. (2005) The faculty of language: what's spe- cial about it? Cognition 95: 201-236.
91. Prather, J. F., Nowicki, S., Anderson, R. C., Peters, S., and Mooney, R. (2009) Neural correlates of cate- gorical perception in learned vocal communication. Nat. Neurosci. 12, 221-228.
92. Premack, D. (1983) The codes of man and beasts. Behav. Brain Sci. 6 125-167.
93. Reber, A. S. (1969) Transfer of syntac- tic structure in synthetic languages. J. Exp. Psychol. 81: 115-119.
94. Rose, G. J., Goller, F., Gritton, H. J., and Plamondon, S. L. (2004) Species- typical songs in white- crowned sparrows tutored with only phrase pairs. Nature 753-758.
95. Saffran, J. J. R., Aslin, R. R. N., and New- port, E. L. (1996) Statistical learning by 8-month-old infants. Science 274, 1926-1928
96. Saffran, J. R., Johnson, E. K., Aslin, R. N., and Newport, E. L. (1999) Sta- tistical learning of tone sequences by human infants and adults. Cognition 70: 27-52.
97. Sanders, L. D., Newport, E. L., and Neville, H. J. (2002) Segmenting nonsense: an event-related potential index of perceived onsets in con-tinuous speech. Nat. Neurosci. 5: 700-703.
98. Scharff, C., and Nottebohm, F. (1991) A comparative study of the behavioral deficits following lesions of various parts of the zebra finch song sys- tem: implications for vocal learning. J. Neurosci. 11: 2896-2913.
99. Schoenbaum, G., and Setlow, B. (2001) Integrating orbitofrontal cortex into prefrontal theory: common process-ing themes across species and subdi-visions. Learn. Mem. 8, 134-147.
100. Skinner, B. (1934) The extinction of chained reflexes. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 20: 234-237.
101. Sockman, K. W., Gentner, T. Q., and Ball, G. F. (2002) Recent expe- rience modulates forebrain gene-expression in response to mate-choice cues in European starlings. Proc. Biol. Sci. 269: 2479-2485.
102. Straub, R. O., and Terrace, H. S. (1982) Generalization of serial learning in the pigeon. Anim. Learn. Behav. 9: 454-468.
103. Takahasi, M.,Yamada, H., and Okanoya, K. (2010) Statistical and prosodic cues for song segmentation learn- ing by bengalese finches (Lonchura striata var. domestica) Ethology 116: 481-489.
104. Terrace, H. S. (2005) The simultaneous chain:a new approach to serial learn- ing. Trends Cogn. Sci. (Regul. Ed.) 9: 202-210.
105. Terrace, H. (2011) "Missing links in the evolution of language," in Char- acterizing Consciousness: From Cog- nition to the Clinic? Research and Perspectives in Neurosciences, eds S. Dehaene and Y. Christen (Berlin: Springer-Verlag), 1-25.
106. Theunissen, F. E., Sen, K., and Doupe,A. J. (2000) Spectral-temporal recep- tive fields of nonlinear auditory neu-rons obtained using natural sounds. J. Neurosci. 20: 2315-2331.
107. Thiessen, E. D., and Saffran, J. R. (2003) When cues collide: use of stress and statistical cues to word boundaries by 7- to 9-month-old infants. Dev. Psychol. 39: 706-716.
108. Thompson, J. V., and Gentner, T. Q. (2010) Song recognition learning and stimulus-specific weakening of neural responses in the avian audi- tory forebrain. J. Neurophysiol. 103: 1785-1797.
109. Thompson, R. K., Oden, D. L., and Boysen, S. T. (1997) Language-naive chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) judge relations between relations in a conceptual matching-to-sample task. J. Exp. Psychol. Anim. Behav. Process. 23: 31-43.
110. Thompson, R. K. R., and Oden, D. L. (2000) Categorical perception and conceptual judgments by nonhu-man primates: the paleological mon- key and the analogical ape. Cogn. Sci. 24: 363-396.
111. Toro, J. M., and Trobalón, J. B. (2005) Statistical computations over a speech stream in a rodent. Percept. Psychophys. 67: 867-875.
112. Tsunada, J., Lee, J. H., and Cohen, Y. E. (2011) Representation of speech categories in the primate audi- tory cortex. J. Neurophysiol. 105: 2634-2646.
113. van Heijningen, C. A. A., de Visser, J., Zuidema, W., and ten Cate, C. (2009) Simple rules can explain discrimination of putative recursive syntactic structures by a songbird species. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 106: 20538-20543.
114. Versace, E., Endress, A. D., and Hauser, M. D. (2008) Pattern recogni-tion mediates flexible timing of vocalizations in nonhuman pri-mates: experiments with cotton- top tamarins. Anim. Behav. 76: 1885-1892.
115. Vonk, J. (2003) Gorilla (Gorilla gorilla gorilla) and orangutan (Pongo abelii) understanding of first- and second- order relations. Anim. Cogn. 6: 77-86.
116. Wallis, J. D.,Anderson, K. C., and Miller, E. K. (2001) Single neurons in pre- frontal cortex encode abstract rules. Nature 411: 953-956.
117. Wallis, J. D., and Miller, E. K. (2003) From rule to response: neuronal processes in the premotor and pre- frontal cortex. J. Neurophysiol. 90: 1790-1806.
118. Washburn, M. F. (1916) Movement and Mental Imagery: Outlines of a Motor Theory of the Complexer Men- tal Processes. Boston: Houghton Mif- flin Company.
119. Wasserman, E. A., Hugart, J. A., and Kirkpatrick-Steger, K. (1995) Pigeons show same-different con- ceptualization after training with complex visual stimuli. J. Exp. Psychol. Anim. Behav. Process. 21: 248-252.
120. Wasserman, E. A., Young, M. E., and Cook, R. G. (2004) Variability dis- crimination in humans and animals: implications for adaptive action. Am. Psychol. 59: 879-890.
121. Watson, J. (1920) Is thinking merely the action of language mechanisms? Br. J. Psychol. 11: 87-104.
122. Weisman, R. G., Wasserman, E. A., Dodd,P.W.,and Larew,M. B. (1980) Representation and retention of two-event sequences in pigeons. J. Exp. Psychol. Anim. Behav. Process. 6: 312-325.
123. Werker, J. F., and Lalonde, C. E. (1988) Cross-language speech perception: initial capabilities and develop-mental change. Dev. Psychol. 24: 672-683.
124. Williams,H.,and Staples,K. (1992) Syl-lable chunking in zebra finch (Tae- niopygia guttata)song.J. Comp. Psy- chol. 106: 278-286.
125. Wilson, B., Mackintosh, N. J., and Boakes, R. A. (1985) Transfer of relational rules in matching and oddity learning by pigeons and corvids. Q. J. Exp. Psychol. B 37: 313-332.
126. Zokoll, M. A., Naue, N., Herrmann, C. S., and Langemann, U. (2008) Audi- tory memory:a comparison between humans and starlings. Brain Res. 1220: 33-46.