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Abstract
Bird song and human speech are learned early in life and for both cases engagement with live social tutors generally leads to better learning outcomes than passive audio-only exposure. Real-world tutor–tutee relations are normally not uni- but multimodal and observations suggest that visual cues related to sound production might enhance vocal learning. We tested this hypothesis by pairing appropriate, colour-realistic, high frame-rate videos of a singing adult male zebra finch tutor with song playbacks and presenting these stimuli to juvenile zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata). Juveniles exposed to song playbacks combined with video presentation of a singing bird approached the stimulus more often and spent more time close to it than juveniles exposed to audio playback only or audio playback combined with pixelated and time-reversed videos. However, higher engagement with the realistic audio–visual stimuli was not predictive of better song learning. Thus, although multimodality increased stimulus engagement and biologically relevant video content was more salient than colour and movement equivalent videos, the higher engagement with the realistic audio–visual stimuli did not lead to enhanced vocal learning. Whether the lack of three-dimensionality of a video tutor and/or the lack of meaningful social interaction make them less suitable for facilitating song learning than audio–visual exposure to a live tutor remains to be tested.
Highlights
Bird song is one of the best-studied animal examples of vocally learned signalling (Catchpole and Slater 1995) and it is often used as a model system for human speech acquisition, because of the many similarities between human speech and bird song (Doupe and Kuhl 1999; Bolhuis et al 2010)
One of the open research questions in the study of both speech and bird song development is whether, and to what extent, exposure to the visual cues accompanying the production of vocalizations, such as lip movements in speech and beak movements in bird song, plays a role in vocal development
Given the well-established experimental tutoring paradigms, bird song offers a system in which the effect of visual cues on the vocal learning process can be studied experimentally (Doupe and Kuhl 1999; Brainard and Doupe 2002; Goldstein et al 2003)
Summary
Bird song is one of the best-studied animal examples of vocally learned signalling (Catchpole and Slater 1995) and it is often used as a model system for human speech acquisition, because of the many similarities between human speech and bird song (Doupe and Kuhl 1999; Bolhuis et al 2010). Instead of learning from a bird that is physically present, young birds are tutored by playing back pre-recorded conspecific song via loudspeakers, either under operant control of the juvenile bird or passively (Derégnaucourt 2011) These methods allow researchers control over the quantity, quality and timing of song exposure. The difference between multi- and unimodal tutoring has rarely been considered in the discussion on why several bird species learn better from live- than from tape tutors (Nelson 1997; Baptista and Gaunt 1997; Soma 2011)
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