The extent to which humans and nonhumans share numerical competency is a matter of
debate. Some researchers argue that nonhumans, lacking human language, possess only a …

Dancing to music is ancient and widespread in human cultures. While dance shows great
cultural diversity, it often involves nonvocal rhythmic movements synchronized to musical …

FOR THE PAST 200 YEARS, virtually all attempts to account for the neural bases and the
evolution of human language have focused on the neocortex. And in the past 40 years …

Syllables are elementary building blocks of bird song. In the sounds of many songbirds, a
large class of syllables can be approximated as amplitude and frequency varying brief …

Complex social life requires individuals to recognize and remember group members [1] and,
within those, to distinguish affiliates from nonaffiliates. Whereas long-term individual …

Kinematic analyses have demonstrated that the extent to which a songbird's beak is open
when singing correlates with the acoustic frequencies of the sounds produced, suggesting …

Recent studies of vocal mechanics in songbirds have identified a functional role for the beak
in sound production. The vocal tract (trachea and beak) filters harmonic overtones from …

Human speech and bird vocalization are complex communicative behaviors with notable
similarities in development and underlying mechanisms [1]. However, there is an important …

Vocal learning is a behavioral trait in which the social and acoustic environment shapes the
vocal repertoire of individuals. Over the past century, the study of vocal learning has …

This book addresses central questions in the evolution of language: where it came from;
how it relates to primate communication; how and why it evolved; how it came to be …