
Birdsong, Speech, and Language
Exploring the Evolution of Mind and Brain
Overview
Author(s)
Praise
Summary
Prominent scholars consider the cognitive and neural similarities between birdsong and human speech and language.
Scholars have long been captivated by the parallels between birdsong and human speech and language. In this book, leading scholars draw on the latest research to explore what birdsong can tell us about the biology of human speech and language and the consequences for evolutionary biology. After outlining the basic issues involved in the study of both language and evolution, the contributors compare birdsong and language in terms of acquisition, recursion, and core structural properties, and then examine the neurobiology of song and speech, genomic factors, and the emergence and evolution of language.
Contributors Hermann Ackermann, Gabriël J.L. Beckers, Robert C. Berwick, Johan J. Bolhuis, Noam Chomsky, Frank Eisner, Martin Everaert, Michale S. Fee, Olga Fehér, Simon E. Fisher, W. Tecumseh Fitch, Jonathan B. Fritz, Sharon M.H. Gobes, Riny Huijbregts, Eric Jarvis, Robert Lachlan, Ann Law, Michael A. Long, Gary F. Marcus, Carolyn McGettigan, Daniel Mietchen, Richard Mooney, Sanne Moorman, Kazuo Okanoya, Christophe Pallier, Irene M. Pepperberg, Jonathan F. Prather, Franck Ramus, Eric Reuland, Constance Scharff, Sophie K. Scott, Neil Smith, Ofer Tchernichovski, Carel ten Cate, Christopher K. Thompson, Frank Wijnen, Moira Yip, Wolfram Ziegler, Willem Zuidema
Hardcover
$60.00 X ISBN: 9780262018609 560 pp. | 7 in x 9 in 93 b&w illus.Paperback
$35.00 X ISBN: 9780262528849 560 pp. | 7 in x 9 in 93 b&w illus.Reviews
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Evaluating the book as a whole, it is simply a splendid piece of scholarship.
Darcy Sperlich
The Linguist List
Endorsements
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This book is devoted to a topic—birdsong and human speech—that is of interest to evolutionary biologists and to students of human language, as well as to the general reader. Both humans and birds produce and react to acoustic signals, but they do so in ways that have some similarities and many obvious differences. The authors of the different chapters are the world's leading experts on the topics they discuss, and their chapters contribute information, of which much is totally new and of obvious importance.
Morris Halle
Institute Professor and Professor of Linguistics, Emeritus, MIT