ArticleThe Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience2014
Independent premotor encoding of the sequence and structure of birdsong in avian cortex.
Article in The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers.
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Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed.
- A species rules syntax model accurately organizes birdsong syllables into songs.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- High-throughput assessment of vocal modulation following chemogenetic inhibition in songbirds.iScience · 2026Article
- Article
- The Temporal Organization of Learned Vocal Behavior Is Predicted by Species Rather Than Experience.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Article
- An avian cortical circuit for chunking tutor song syllables into simple vocal-motor units.Nature communications · 2020Article
- Article
- Manipulations of inhibition in cortical circuitry differentially affect spectral and temporal features of Bengalese finch song.Journal of neurophysiology · 2020Article
- Experience-Dependent Intrinsic Plasticity During Auditory Learning.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2019Article
- Morphological characterization of HVC projection neurons in the zebra finch (Taeniopygia guttata).The Journal of comparative neurology · 2018Article
- Building a state space for song learning.Current opinion in neurobiology · 2018Review
- Songbirds work around computational complexity by learning song vocabulary independently of sequence.Nature communications · 2017Article
- Dissociable Effects on Birdsong of Androgen Signaling in Cortex-Like Brain Regions of Canaries.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2017Article
- A distributed neural network model for the distinct roles of medial and lateral HVC in zebra finch song production.Journal of neurophysiology · 2017Article
- Temperature manipulation of neuronal dynamics in a forebrain motor control nucleus.PLoS computational biology · 2017Article
- Article
- Reduced perfusion in Broca's area in developmental stuttering.Human brain mapping · 2017Article
- Predicting plasticity: acute context-dependent changes to vocal performance predict long-term age-dependent changes.Journal of neurophysiology · 2015Article
- A circular model for song motor control in Serinus canaria.Frontiers in computational neuroscience · 2015Article
- Article
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6 authors.
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Abstract
How the brain coordinates rapid sequences of learned behavior, such as human speech, remains a fundamental problem in neuroscience. Birdsong is a model of such behavior, which is learned and controlled by a neural circuit that spans avian cortex, basal ganglia, and thalamus. The songs of adult male zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata), produced as rapid sequences of vocal gestures (syllables), are encoded by the cortical premotor region HVC (proper name). While the motor encoding of song within HVC has traditionally been viewed as unitary and distributed, we used an ablation technique to ask whether the sequence and structure of song are processed independently within HVC. Results revealed a functional topography across the medial-lateral axis of HVC. Bilateral ablation of medial HVC induced a positive disruption of song (increase in atypical syllable sequences), whereas bilateral ablation of lateral HVC induced a negative disruption (omission of individual syllables). Bilateral ablation of central HVC either had no effect on song or induced syllable omission, similar to lateral HVC ablation. We then investigated HVC connectivity and found parallel afferent and efferent pathways that transit medial and lateral HVC and converge at vocal motor cortex. In light of recent evidence that syntactic and lexical components of human speech are processed independently by neighboring regions of cortex (Menenti et al., 2012), our demonstration of anatomically distinct pathways that differentially process the sequence and structure of birdsong in parallel suggests that the vertebrate brain relies on a common approach to encode rapid sequences of vocal gestures.
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