Constraints and Flexibility during Vocal Development
Asif Ghazanfar, Professor of Neuroscience, Princeton University
Human vocal development is typically conceived as a sequence of two processes—an early maturation phase where vocal sounds change as a function of body growth (“constraints”) followed by a period during which social experience can influence vocal sound production (“flexibility”). However, studies of other behaviors (e.g., locomotion) reveal that growth and experience are interactive throughout development. Vocal development is not exceptional; it is also the on-going result of the interplay between an infant’s growing biological system of production (the body and the nervous system) and experience with caregivers. I will present work on developing marmoset monkeys — a species that exhibits strikingly similar vocal developmental processes to those of prelinguistic humans — that demonstrates how constraints and flexibility are parallel and interactive processes. |
Asif Ghazanfar is Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology and an associated faculty member in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University. Born in Washington state and raised in neighboring Idaho, he graduated with a philosophy degree from the University of Idaho, then went on to earn his PhD in Neurobiology from Duke University. After that, he did postdoctoral work at Harvard University and was then a research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany before moving to Princeton. His research focuses on the integrative biology of vocal communication in primates. |
