Male zebra finches, small songbirds native to central Australia, learn their songs by copying what they hear from their fathers. These songs, often used as mating calls, develop early in life as juvenile birds experiment ...
Plants & Animals
Nov 30, 2015
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Songbirds and humans both learn to vocalize by imitation and produce their respective sounds in much the same way, by arranging syllables into sequences. Very little is known, however, about how this ability arises during ...
Plants & Animals
Aug 30, 2013
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When we speak, our enunciation and pronunciation of words and syllables fluctuates and varies from person to person. Given this, how do infants decode all of the spoken sounds they hear to learn words and meanings?
Social Sciences
May 18, 2011
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As one species of European songbird island-hopped to colonize mid-Atlantic archipelagoes over the course of a half million years, their songs lost their sense of syntax.
Plants & Animals
Sep 26, 2013
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Like humans learning to speak, juvenile birds learn to sing by mimicking vocalizations of adults of the same species during development. Juvenile birds preferentially learn the song of their own species, even in noisy environments ...
Plants & Animals
Dec 8, 2016
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Animals are more eloquent than previously assumed. Even the monosyllabic call of the banded mongoose is structured and thus comparable with the vowel and consonant system of human speech. Behavioral biologists from the University ...
Plants & Animals
Jan 10, 2013
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Performing the mental gymnastics of making the phoenetic distinction between words and phrases such as "I'm hear" to "I'm here" or "I can't so but tons" to "I can't sew buttons," is familiar to anyone who has encountered ...
Computer Sciences
Nov 6, 2018
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Researchers at UC San Francisco have shown how the Bengalese finch, a domesticated songbird, can learn to tweak its song in specific ways depending on context, which could shed light on how the human brain learns to apply ...
Plants & Animals
Nov 16, 2017
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For a songbird, learning a new song is akin to a child learning a new language. Zebra finches approach this challenge step by step, and even make a detour in the process - by taking song syllables that they already know and ...
Plants & Animals
Nov 1, 2017
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28
A study in Proceedings of the Royal Society B shows that zebra finches can pick up on the features in human language that express emphasis and emotion.
Plants & Animals
May 29, 2014
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