Linguistic perception: neural processing of a whistled language.

Abstract

Silbo Gomero is a whistled language that is a rare and endangered surrogate of Spanish, used by shepherds on the island of La Gomera in the Canary Islands for communication over long distances on difficult terrain. Here we show that areas of the brain normally associated with spoken-language function are also activated in proficient whistlers, but not in controls, when they are listening to Silbo Gomero. Our findings demonstrate that the language-processing regions of the human brain can adapt to a surprisingly wide range of signalling forms.