Abstract:
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The origins of rhythm in music and language seem to be intertwined and may
share evolutionary pathways (Fitch, 2006, 2013; Patel, 2006, 2010; Ravignani
and Madison, 2017). The development of song in birds and speech in humans
follows similar sensorimotor phases and parallel periods of vocal learning
(Marler, 1970, 1976), an ability that allows animals to imitate and modify the
vocalizations learned from other individuals thanks to specific neural
connections (Jarvis, 2006, 2007). For the last decade, the vocal learning beat
perception and synchronization hypothesis (Patel, 2006; Patel, Iversen,
Bregman, and Schulz, 2009; Schachner, Brady, Pepperberg and Hauser, 2009)
has been widely accepted among researchers, proposing that only vocal learners
can extract and entrain to a periodic pulse. However, current animal studies
reported beat entrainment (Cook, Rouse, Wilson and Reichmuth, 2013) and
auditory synchronization (Hattori, Tomonaga and Matsuzawa, 2013) in not
classically classified vocal learners, and non-human primates display some
rhythmic behaviors in social interactions (see Merchant and Honing, 2013;
Ravignani, Gingras, Asano, Sonnweber, Matellán and Fitch, 2013). |