Silbo Gomero.
Silbo Gomero is a whistled language from La Gomera, one of the smaller islands of the Canary archipelago. It is a surrogate of the Spanish language, consisting in a whistled encoding of Spanish as spoken on the island. Until about twenty years ago, Silbo Gomero was used as a means of long-distance communication by all the inhabitants of the mountainous centre of the island, to convey a wide variety of messages (indeed any message at all, according to La Gomera residents). There are very few fluent whistlers or “Silbadores” left today, although Silbo Gomero is undergoing something of a revival and has recently been introduced into the curriculum of some primary schools. The aim of our studies of Silbo Gomero is to reveal the cognitive and neural underpinnings of this whistled language, using brain imaging techniques such as fMRI and ERPs to discover, for instance, lexical or semantic processing.