Benjamin Morillon, Luc H. Arnal, and Pascal Belin.

2022. PLOS Biology 20 (7): e3001742. —  @HAL

Categorising voices is crucial for auditory-based social interactions. A recent study by Rupp and colleagues in PLOS Biology capitalises on human intracranial recordings to describe the spatiotemporal pattern of neural activity leading to voice-selective responses in associative auditory cortex.

Adrien Meguerditchian.

2022.  Ethology Ecology & Evolution 34 (3): 288–302  —  @HAL

Nonhuman primates mostly communicate not only with a rich vocal repertoire but also with manual and body gestures. In contrast to great apes, this latter communicative gestural system has been poorly investigated in monkeys. In the last 15 years, the gestural research we conducted in the baboons Papio anubis, an Old World monkey species, have shown potential direct evolutionary continuities with some key properties of language such as intentionality, referentiality, learning flexibility as well as its underlying lateralization and hemispheric specialization of the brain. According to these collective findings, which are congruent with the ones reported in great apes, it is thus not excluded that features of gestural communication shared between humans, great apes and baboons, may have played a critical role in the phylogenetic roots of language and dated back, not to the Hominidae evolution, but rather to their much older catarrhine common ancestor 25-40 million years ago.

Camille L. Grasso, Johannes C. Ziegler, Jennifer T. Coull, and Marie Montant.

2022.  Experimental Psychology 69 (4): 210–17 — @HAL

In Western cultures where people read and write from left to right, time is represented along a spatial continuum that goes from left to right (past to future), known as the mental timeline (MTL). In language, this MTL was supported by space–time congruency effects: People are faster to make lexical decisions to words conveying past or future information when left/right manual responses are compatible with the MTL. Alternatively, in cultures where people read from right to left, space–time congruency effects go in the opposite direction. Such cross-cultural differences suggest that repeated writing and reading dynamic movements are critically involved in the spatial representation of time. In most experiments on the space–time congruency effect, participants use their hand for responding, an effector that is associated to the directionality of writing. To investigate the role of the directionality of reading in the space–time congruency effect, we asked participants to make lateralized eye movements (left or right saccades) to indicate whether stimuli were real words or not (lexical decision). Eye movement responses were slower and higher in amplitude for responses incompatible with the direction of the MTL. These results reinforce the claim that repeated directional reading and writing movements promote the embodiment of time-related words.

Régis Trapeau, Etienne Thoret, and Pascal Belin.

2023, Frontiers in Neuroscience 16: 1075288 — @HAL

The Temporal Voice Areas (TVAs) respond more strongly to speech sounds than to non-speech vocal sounds, but does this make them Temporal “Speech” Areas? We provide a perspective on this issue by combining univariate, multivariate, and representational similarity analyses of fMRI activations to a balanced set of speech and non-speech vocal sounds. We find that while speech sounds activate the TVAs more than non-speech vocal sounds, which is likely related to their larger temporal modulations in syllabic rate, they do not appear to activate additional areas nor are they segregated from the non-speech vocal sounds when their higher activation is controlled. It seems safe, then, to continue calling these regions the Temporal Voice Areas.