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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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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89
It was in grade school classes that most of us first learned about the syllable—the tiny unit of organization for speech sounds, bundles of which can be combined to construct words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, mystery ...
Social Sciences
May 4, 2015
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144
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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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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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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Imagine you're on a spaceship with engine trouble. Your captain knows she must land the ship for repairs. The navigator identifies two viable planets that could do the job. Little is known of either, other than the Lamonians ...
Other
Jul 19, 2013
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(Phys.org) —Bullfinches learn from human teachers to sing melodies accurately, according to a new study by the late Nicolai Jürgen and researchers from the University of Kaiserslautern in Germany. Their analysis of human ...
Plants & Animals
Jun 26, 2013
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(Phys.org) —A team of researchers from Japan, Israel and the U.S. has found evidence that suggests birds and human infants learn to string syllables together in roughly the same way: through stepwise improvement. In their ...
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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