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The human primate is a deeply cultural species, our cognition being shaped by culture, and cultural transmission amounting to an “epidemic of mental representations ” (Sperber, 1996). The architecture of this aspect of human cognition has been shaped by our evolutionary past in ways that we can now begin to discern through comparative studies of other primates. Processes of social learning (learning from others) are important for cognitive science to understand because they are cognitively complex and take many inter-related forms; they shape traditions, cultures and nonsocial aspects of cognition; and in turn they may be shaped by their cultural context. The study of primate social learning and culture has in recent years enjoyed a renaissance, providing a wealth of new findings, key aspects of which are reviewed. The focus is on cognitive issues, including learning about the consequences, sequential structure and hierarchical organization of actions; relating stored knowledge to the assimilation of new social knowledge; feedback guiding the construction of imitations; conceptual grasp of imita-

The design of robust interfaces that process conversational speech is a challenging research direction largely because users’ spoken language is so variable. This research explored a new dimension of speaker stylistic variation by examining whether users’ speech converges systematically with the text-to-speech (TTS) heard from a software partner. To pursue this question, a study was conducted in which twenty-four 7-to-10-yearold children conversed with animated partners that embodied different TTS voices. An analysis of children’s amplitude, durational features, and dialogue response latencies confirmed that they spontaneously adapt several basic acoustic-prosodic features of their speech 10-50%, with the largest adaptations involving utterance pause structure and amplitude. Children’s speech adaptations were relatively rapid, bidirectional, and dynamically readaptable when introduced to new partners, and generalized across different types of users and TTS voices. Adaptations also occurred consistently, with 70-95 % of children converging with their partner’s TTS, although individual differences in magnitude of adaptation were evident. In the design of future conversational systems, users’ spontaneous convergence could be exploited to guide their speech within system processing bounds, thereby enhancing robustness. Adaptive system processing could yield further significant performance gains. The long-term goal of this research is the development of predictive models of human-computer communication to guide the design of new

The tendency to move in rhythmic synchrony with a musical beat (e.g., via head bobbing, foot tapping, or dance) is a human universal [1] yet is not commonly observed in other species [2]. Does this ability reflect a brain specialization for music cognition, or does it build on neural circuitry that ordinarily serves other functions? According to the ‘‘vocal learning and rhythmic synchronization’ ’ hypothesis [3], entrainment to a musical beat relies on the neural circuitry for complex vocal learning, an ability that requires a tight link between auditory and motor circuits in the brain [4, 5]. This hypothesis predicts that only vocal learning species (such as humans and some birds, cetaceans, and pinnipeds, but not nonhuman primates) are capable of synchronizing movements to a musical beat. Here we report experimental evidence for synchronization to a beat in a sulphur-crested

Abstract: Although sophisticated insights have been gained into the neurobiology of singing in songbirds, little comparable knowledge exists for humans, the most complex singers in nature. Human song complexity is evidenced by the capacity to generate both richly structured melodies and coordinated multi-part harmonizations. The present study aimed to elucidate this multi-faceted vocal system by using 15O-water positron emission tomography to scan -listen and respond‖ performances of amateur musicians either singing repetitions of novel melodies, singing harmonizations with novel melodies, or vocalizing monotonically. Overall, major blood flow increases were seen in the primary and secondary auditory cortices, primary motor cortex, frontal operculum, supplementary motor area, insula, posterior cerebellum, and basal ganglia. Melody repetition and harmonization produced highly similar patterns of activation. However, whereas all three tasks activated secondary auditory cortex (posterior Brodmann Area 22), only melody repetition and harmonization activated the planum polare (BA 38). This result implies that BA 38 is responsible for an even higher level of musical processing than BA 22. Finally, all three of these -listen and respond‖ tasks activated the frontal operculum (Broca's area), a region involved in cognitive/motor sequence production and imitation, thereby implicating it in musical imitation and vocal learning. Author Keywords: Singing; Song system; Brain; Music; Melody; Harmony, Motor Systems and Sensorimotor Integration, Cortex Article: Singing is a specialized class of vocal behavior found in a limited number of animal taxa, including humans, gibbons, humpback whales, and about half of the nine thousand species of bird. Various functions have been attributed to singing, including territorial defense, mate attraction, pair bonding, coalition signaling, and group cohesion [5, 25, 46 and 76]. Song production is mediated by a specialized system of brain areas and neural pathways known as the song system. This system is also responsible for song learning, as most singing species acquire their songs via social learning during development [30 and 31]. In some species, known as -age-limited learners‖, song learning occurs once during a critical period; in -open-ended learners‖, song learning occurs throughout much of the life span (e.g., Although humans are by far the most complex singers in nature, the neurobiology of human song is much less well understood. A deeper understanding of singing may benefit from a comparative approach, as human singers show features that are both shared with, and distinct from, birds and other singers in nature

Vocal learning is well known among passerine and psittacine birds, but most data on mammals are equivocal. Specific bene¢ts of vocal learning are poorly understood for most species. One case where vocal learning should be favoured by selection is where calls indicate group membership and group mates are unrelated. Female greater spear-nosed bats, Phyllostomus hastatus, live in stable groups of unrelated bats and use loud, broadband calls to coordinate foraging movements of social group mates. Bats benefit from group foraging. Calls di¡er between female social groups and cave colonies, and playback experiments demonstrate that bats perceive these acoustic differences. Here I show that the group distinctive structure of calls arises through vocal learning. Females change call structure when group composition changes, resulting in increased similarity among new social group mates. Comparisons of transfers with agematched half-sibs indicate that call changes are not simply due to maturation, the physical environment or heredity.These results suggest that studies testing vocal learning in mammals could profit by focusing on vocalizations that signify group membership.

For many years the evolution of language has been seen as a disreputable topic, mired in fanciful "just so stories" about language origins. However, in the last decade a new synthesis of modern linguistics, cognitive neuroscience and neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory has begun to make important contributions to our understanding of the biology and evolution of language. I review some of this recent progress, focusing on the value of the comparative method, which uses data from animal species to draw inferences about language evolution. Discussing speech first, I show how data concerning a wide variety of species, from monkeys to birds, can increase our understanding of the anatomical and neural mechanisms underlying human spoken language, and how bird and whale song provide insights into the ultimate evolutionary function of language. I discuss the ‘‘descended larynx’ ’ of humans, a peculiar adaptation for speech that has received much attention in the past, which despite earlier claims is not uniquely human. Then I will turn to the neural mechanisms underlying spoken language, pointing out the difficulties animals apparently experience in perceiving hierarchical structure in sounds, and stressing the importance of vocal imitation in the evolution of a spoken language. Turning to ultimate function, I suggest that communication among kin (especially between parents and offspring) played a crucial but neglected role in driving language evolution. Finally, I briefly discuss phylogeny, discussing hypotheses that offer plausible routes to human language from a non-linguistic chimp-like ancestor. I conclude that comparative data from living animals will be key to developing a richer, more interdisciplinary understanding of our most distinctively human trait: language.

Two of the most salient features of music are the blending of pitch and the match-ing of time. I propose here a possible evolutionary precursor of human music based on a process I call “contagious heterophony”. Heterophony is a form of pitch blending in which individuals generate similar musical lines but in which these lines are poorly synchronized. A wonderful example can be found in the howling of wolves. Each wolf makes a similar call but the resultant chorus is poorly blended in time. The other major feature of the current hypothesis is contagion. Once one ani-mal starts calling, other members of the group join in through a spreading process. While this type of heterophonic calling is well-represented in nature, synchronized polyphony is not. In this article, I discuss evolutionary scenarios by which the human capacity to integrate musical parts in pitch-space and in time may have emerged in music. In doing so, I make mention of neuroimaging findings that shed light on the neural mechanisms of vocal imitation and metric entrainment in humans, two key processes underlying musical integration. While discussions of the origins of music were commonplace during the 18th and 19th centuries (Condillac, 1746; Rousseau, 1781; Spencer, 1857, 1890; Darwin, 1871, 1872), the topic seemed to fall out of favour during the 20th century. However, an interest in the evolution of music underwent a resurgence at the turn of the

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Vocal plasticity is the ability of an individual to modify its vocalizations according to its environment. Humans benefit from an extreme form of vocal plasticity, allowing us to produce a wide range of sounds. This capacity to modify sounds has been shown in three bird orders and in a few nonhuman mammal species, all characterized by complex vocal communication systems. In other mammals, there is no evidence for a social impact on vocal development. We investigated whether contact calls were affected by social environment and kinship during early ontogeny in goats, a highly vocal and social species. To test the influence of social environment on kid vocalizations, we compared half siblings raised in the same or different groups. The effect of kinship on calls was assessed by comparing full siblings with half siblings. Calls of half siblings were more similar when they had been raised in the same social group than in different groups, and converged with time. Full siblings had more similar calls than half siblings. The group-specific indicators in kid vocalizations show that goat call ontogeny is affected by their social environment. This suggests that vocal plasticity could be more widespread in mammals than previously believed, showing a possible early pathway in the evolution of vocal learning leading to human language. Ó