Levy Florence
School of Psychiatry, University of New South Wales and Prince of Wales Hospital Sydney, NSW, Australia.
Front Psychiatry. 2012 Jan 11;2:78. doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2011.00078. eCollection 2011.
THE MIRROR SYSTEM HYPOTHESIS AND INVESTIGATIONS OF BIRDSONG ARE REVIEWED IN RELATION TO THE SIGNIFICANCE FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF HUMAN SYMBOLIC AND LANGUAGE CAPACITY, IN TERMS OF THREE FUNDAMENTAL FORMS OF COGNITIVE REFERENCE: iconic, indexical, and symbolic. Mirror systems are initially iconic but can progress to indexical reference when produced without the need for concurrent stimuli. Developmental stages in birdsong are also explored with reference to juvenile subsong vs complex stereotyped adult syllables, as an analogy with human language development. While birdsong remains at an indexical reference stage, human language benefits from the capacity for symbolic reference. During a pre-linguistic "babbling" stage, recognition of native phonemic categories is established, allowing further development of subsequent prefrontal and linguistic circuits for sequential language capacity.
象似性、指示性和象征性，来探讨镜像系统假说与鸟鸣研究对于人类符号和语言能力发展的意义。镜像系统最初是象似性的，但在无需同时存在刺激的情况下产生时，可以发展为指示性参照。还参照幼鸟的亚鸣叫声与成年鸟复杂的定型音节，探讨了鸟鸣的发展阶段，以此作为与人类语言发展的类比。虽然鸟鸣仍处于指示性参照阶段，但人类语言受益于符号性参照的能力。在语言前的“咿呀学语”阶段，对母语音位类别的识别得以确立，从而使后续用于序列语言能力的前额叶和语言回路得到进一步发展。
