Vocal learners such as humans and songbirds can learn to produce elaborate patterns of
structurally organized vocalizations, whereas many other vertebrates such as non-human …

Vocalization is a complex behaviour pattern, consisting of essentially three components:
laryngeal activity, respiratory movements and supralaryngeal (articulatory) activity. The …

Soon after Charles Darwin formulated his theory of evolution, primate cognition became a
major area of research. In this book, Michael Tomasello and Josep Call assess the current …

In this chapter we survey the occurrence of vocal learning in mammals and discuss possible
reasons it has evolved. But first it is important to be clear about what we mean by “vocal …

While vocal learning has been studied extensively in birds and mammals, little effort has
been made to define what exactly constitutes vocal learning and to classify the forms that it …

Recent work on human vocal production demonstrates that certain irregular phenomena
seen in human pathological voices and baby crying result from nonlinearities in the vocal …

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 …

Human speech involves species-specific anatomy deriving from the descent of the tongue
into the pharynx. The human tongue's shape and position yields the 1: 1 oral-to-pharyngeal …

For over half a century now, primate vocalizations have been thought to undergo little or no
experience-dependent acoustic changes during development [1]. If any changes are …

Vocal learning is well known among passerine and psittacine birds, but most data on
mammals are equivocal. Specific benefits of vocal learning are poorly understood for most …