Birds might show how humans learn speech

From The University of Chicago:

Researchers at the University of Chicago are studying communication in animals to improve their understanding of how language develops in humans and how they use it.

“We find compelling evidence that language is a phenomenon of evolutionary biology and within the reach of biological investigation,” write biologist Daniel Margoliash and psychologist Howard Nusbaum in “Language: The Perspective from Organismal Biology,” an opinion piece in the current issue of the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

The two researchers challenge the position held by other scholars, including language theorist Noam Chomsky, that the way people develop language is uniquely human and unrelated to communication systems in other animals. In that theory, the ability to speak is contained in a “black box” in the brain and can be opened by informal contact as a baby begins recognizing sounds or a toddler begins speaking.

Recent research, including studies at the University on songbirds, questions that position and argues for inclusion of evolutionary biology as a means of learning more about how language develops. Songbirds also show a human-like capacity to learn complex vocal patterns, the researchers have found.

Margoliash and Nusbaum's research worked with European Starlings. Perhaps that decreases some of the EUST hatred that so many birders hold?

Photo courtesy of South Dakota Birds and Birding

Birds' songs change over time

From NewScientist.com:

JUST as the Bee Gees' disco style sounds antique compared to hip-hop, birdsong can also go out of fashion. Such stylistic changes may help explain how mating barriers arise, eventually leading to new species.

Behavioural ecologists have long known that some songbirds develop local dialects, and that individual birds respond more strongly to their own dialect than to a foreign one. Less is known about how, or how quickly, such differences arise.

To study how a dialect changes over time, Elizabeth Derryberry, a behavioural ecologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, compared recordings of male white-crowned sparrows' song from 1979 - when the Bee Gees topped the charts - and 2003. The modern song, she found, was slower and lower in pitch.

Derryberry received a research award in 2004 from the American Ornithologists' Union for "The impact of culture and selection on vocal performance: implications for song evolution."

Ilustration courtesy of WhatBird.com

Birdsong study could help human stutterers

Researchers at the Methodist Neurological Institute (NI) in Houston and Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City used functional MRI to determine that songbirds have a pronounced right-brain response to the sound of songs, establishing a foundational study for future research on songbird models of speech disorders such as stuttering, as reported today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences U.S.A.

This is the first functional MRI study to determine how vocal sounds are represented within the brain of an awake zebra finch, a well-studied animal model of vocal learning. Because of many similarities between birdsong and human speech, this research could lead to a better understanding of the cause of stuttering and other speech problems.

Zebra Finch courtesy of Geoffrey Dab/Canberra Ornithologists Group