G. J. L. Beckers
2012
Neuroreport 23(3):139, 2012
Abstract There are remarkable behavioral, neural, and genetic similarities between song learning in songbirds and speech acquisition in human infants. Previously, we have argued that this parallel cannot be extended to the level of sentence syntax. Although birdsong ...
2011
Human Biology 83(2):191--212, 2011
Abstract Research into speech perception by nonhuman animals can be crucially informative in assessing whether specific perceptual phenomena in humans have evolved to decode speech, or reflect more general traits. Birds share with humans not only the ...
2010
Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 277(1684):1003--1009, 2010
Abstract Humans readily distinguish spoken words that closely resemble each other in acoustic structure, irrespective of audible differences between individual voices or sex of the speakers. There is an ongoing debate about whether the ability to form phonetic ...