Any account of “what is special about the human brain”(Passingham 2008) must specify the
neural basis of our unique ability to produce speech and delineate how these remarkable …

Recent articles on primate articulatory abilities are revolutionary regarding speech
emergence, a crucial aspect of language evolution, by revealing a human-like system of …

This book provides an extensive overview of research into child production and perception.
It focuses primarily on the first two years of life because, for the majority of children, that …

A detailed understanding of how the acoustic patterns of speech sounds are generated by
the complex 3D shapes of the vocal tract is a major goal in speech research. The Dresden …

Song production in songbirds is a model system for studying learned vocal behavior. As in
humans, bird phonation involves three main motor systems (respiration, vocal organ and …

Phonetic imitation is the unintentional, spontaneous acquisition of speech characteristics of
another talker. Previous work has shown that imitation is strongly moderated by social …

The phonetic potential of nonhuman primate vocal tracts has been the subject of
considerable contention in recent literature. Here, the work of Philip Lieberman (1934 …

Vocal tract length is highly variable across speakers and determines many aspects of the
acoustic speech signal, making it an essential parameter to consider for explaining …

Age‐related increases of speaking rate are not fully understood, but have been attributed to
gains in biologic factors and learned skills that support speech production. This study …

Being able to talk entails having both a species-specific tongue and neural mechanisms that
can acquire and execute the motor acts that generate human speech. Darwinian …