Rauschecker Josef P
Laboratory of Integrative Neuroscience and Cognition, Department of Neuroscience, Georgetown University Medical Center, Washington DC, USA.
Front Evol Neurosci. 2012 May 15;4:7. doi: 10.3389/fnevo.2012.00007. eCollection 2012.
The brains of humans and old-world monkeys show a great deal of anatomical similarity. The auditory cortical system, for instance, is organized into a ventral and a dorsal pathway in both species. A fundamental question with regard to the evolution of speech and language (as well as music) is whether human and monkey brains show principal differences in their organization (e.g., new pathways appearing as a result of a single mutation), or whether species differences are of a more subtle, quantitative nature. There is little doubt about a similar role of the ventral auditory pathway in both humans and monkeys in the decoding of spectrally complex sounds, which some authors have referred to as auditory object recognition. This includes the decoding of speech sounds ("speech perception") and their ultimate linking to meaning in humans. The originally presumed role of the auditory dorsal pathway in spatial processing, by analogy to the visual dorsal pathway, has recently been conceptualized into a more general role in sensorimotor integration and control. Specifically for speech, the dorsal processing stream plays a role in speech production as well as categorization of phonemes during on-line processing of speech.
人类和旧世界猴的大脑在解剖学上有许多相似之处。例如，听觉皮层系统在这两个物种中都被组织成腹侧和背侧通路。关于言语和语言（以及音乐）进化的一个基本问题是，人类和猴的大脑在组织上是否存在主要差异（例如，由于单个突变而出现新的通路），或者物种差异是否更微妙、更具数量性质。毫无疑问，腹侧听觉通路在人类和猴对频谱复杂声音的解码中都起着类似的作用，一些作者将其称为听觉对象识别。这包括语音的解码（“语音感知”）以及它们最终与人类意义的联系。听觉背侧通路最初被认为在空间处理中发挥作用，类似于视觉背侧通路，最近已被概念化为在感觉运动整合和控制中发挥更普遍的作用。特别是对于言语，背侧处理流在言语产生以及言语在线处理过程中对音素的分类中都发挥作用。
