Evolution of the strongest vertebrate rightward action asymmetries: Marine mammal sidedness and human handedness.

Marine mammals and humans have the strongest manifestations of what is apparently a vertebrate-wide tendency toward a rightward action asymmetry associated with routine behavior. Marine mammal asymmetries usually involve whole-body actions associated with feeding. The human-like strength of these asymmetries may result from a problem of external aquatic support for the reactive component of the demanding lateral maneuvers of large marine mammals in daily pursuit of prey.

Vertebrate whole-body-action asymmetries and the evolution of right handedness: a comparison between humans and marine mammals.

As part of a vertebrate-wide trend toward left brain/right side asymmetries in routine whole-body actions, marine mammals show signs of rightward appendage-use biases, and short- and long-term turning asymmetries most of which are unique in non-humans in being just as strong as right handedness, and even stronger than human handedness-related turning biases. Short-term marine mammal turning asymmetries and human about-turning asymmetries share a leading right side, suggesting a commonality in left hemisphere intentional control. The long-term leftward turning bias that both groups share may be an indirect result of both sensory and motor influences on the right side in dolphins, but be induced by a right-hemisphere-controlled spatial/attentional bias to the left in humans.

Accuracy of consonant-vowel syllables in young cochlear implant recipients and hearing children in the single-word period.

Purpose: Attaining speech accuracy requires that children perceive and attach meanings to vocal output on the basis of production system capacities. Because auditory perception underlies speech accuracy, profiles for children with hearing loss (HL) differ from those of children with normal hearing (NH).

Method: To understand the impact of auditory history on emergence of speech capacities, the authors compared consonant-vowel (CV) syllable accuracy in early words in 4 NH children and 4 children with HL who received cochlear implantation (CI) before age 2 years.

Segmental properties of input to infants: a study of Korean.

Segmental distributions of Korean infant-directed speech (IDS) and adult-directed speech (ADS) were compared. Significant differences were found in both consonant and vowel patterns. Korean-speaking mothers using IDS displayed more frequent labial consonantal place and less frequent coronal and glottal place and fricative manner.

Frame dominance in infants with hearing loss.

Purpose: According to the frames then content (f/c) hypothesis (P. F. MacNeilage & B.

Characteristics of the rhythmic organization of vocal babbling: implications for an amodal linguistic rhythm.

Vocal babbling involves production of rhythmic sequences of a mouth close-open alternation giving the perceptual impression of a sequence of consonant-vowel syllables. Petitto and co-workers have argued vocal babbling rhythm is the same as manual syllabic babbling rhythm, in that it has a frequency of 1 cycle per second. They also assert that adult speech and sign language display the same frequency.

Message and medium: Lowly and action-related origins.

Hurford presents a much-needed lowly origins scenario for the evolution of conceptual precursors to lexical items. But more is still needed on action, regarding both the message level of lexical concepts and the medium. We summarize our complementary action-based lowly origins (frame/content) scenario for the vocal auditory medium of language, which, like Hurford's scenario, is anchored in a phylogenetically old neurological dichotomy.

Acquisition of serial complexity in speech production: a comparison of phonetic and phonological approaches to first word production.

Comparison was made between performance-based and competence-based approaches to the understanding of first word production. The performance-related frame/content approach is representative of the biological/functional perspective of phonetics in seeking explanations based on motor, perceptual and cognitive aspects of speech actions. From this perspective, intrasyllabic consonant-vowel (CV) co-occurrence patterns and intersyllabic sequence patterns are viewed as reflective of biomechanical constraints emerging from mandibular oscillation cycles.