Friday, September 6, 2013

Discovery helps to unlock brain's speech-learning mechanism

USC scientists have discovered a population of neurons in the brains of juvenile songbirds that are necessary for allowing the birds to recognize the vocal sounds they are learning to imitate. These neurons encode a memory of learned vocal sounds and form a crucial (and hitherto only theorized) part of the neural system that allows songbirds to hear, imitate, and learn its species' songs - just as human infants acquire speech sounds...

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