https://goo.gl/oKwJPr
Using an approach first developed for studying infant language learning, the team of neuroscientists led by Dr Yuki Kikuchi and Prof Chris Petkov of Newcastle University had humans and monkeys listen to sequences of spoken words from a made-up language. Both species were able to learn the predictive relationships between the spoken sounds in the sequences.
Neural responses from the auditory cortex in the two species revealed how populations of neurons responded to the speech sounds and to the learned predictive relationships between the sounds. The neural responses were found to be remarkably similar in both species, suggesting that the way the human auditory cortex responds to speech harnesses evolutionarily conserved mechanisms, rather than those that have uniquely specialized in humans for speech or language.
"Being able to predict events is vital for so much of what we do every day," Professor Petkov notes. "Now that we know humans and monkeys share the ability to predict speech we can apply this knowledge to take forward research to improve our understanding of the human brain."