Abstract:

Voluntary control of vocal production is an essential component for the faculty of language, distinguishing us from other primates. Recent experiments have begun to reveal the voluntary vocal controllability in nonhuman primates, but these learning mechanisms remains unclear. Here we showed Japanese monkeys can learn to vocalize voluntary in response to visual cue, however vocal action was learned by the different ways of manual action. The associative learning between cue detection and motor execution primarily contributed to volitional manual control. By contrast, motor inhibitory control played more crucial role on learning of vocal control. These findings suggest inhibitory control enhances to decouple the vocalizations from accompanied motivational states, which would be a pre-adaptive stage for emergence of emotion-independent vocal production in human speech.