Abstract
Studies of acoustic communication often focus on the categories and units of vocalizations, but subtle variation also occurs in how these signals are uttered. In human speech, it is not only phonemes and words that carry information but also the timbre, intonation, and stress of how speech sounds are delivered (often referred to as “paralinguistic content”). In non-human animals, variation across utterances of vocal signals also carries behaviorally relevant information across taxa. However, the discriminability of these cues has been rarely tested in a psychophysical paradigm. Here, we focus on acoustic communication in the zebra finch (Taeniopygia guttata), a songbird species in which the male produces a single stereotyped motif repeatedly in song bouts. These motif renditions, like the song repetitions of many birds, sound very similar to the casual human listener. In this study, we show that zebra finches can easily discriminate between the renditions, even at the level of single song syllables, much as humans can discriminate renditions of speech sounds. These results support the notion that sensitivity to fine acoustic details may be a primary channel of information in zebra finch song, as well as a shared, foundational property of vocal communication systems across species.
Highlights
Studies of acoustic communication often focus on the categories and units of vocalizations, but subtle variation occurs in how these signals are uttered
Birdsong has long been a dominant model of human speech and vocal learning, and considerable research has been dedicated to describing the significance of variation in rhythm, timing, and the number and order of elements in birdsong within and across species[2,39,40,41]
Perhaps because the linguistic content of human speech is so unique, much of the research comparing acoustic communication systems in humans and non-human animals has focused on finding parallels to these components of human language
Summary
Studies of acoustic communication often focus on the categories and units of vocalizations, but subtle variation occurs in how these signals are uttered. We focus on acoustic communication in the zebra finch (Taeniopygia guttata), a songbird species in which the male produces a single stereotyped motif repeatedly in song bouts These motif renditions, like the song repetitions of many birds, sound very similar to the casual human listener. The parallels between acoustic communication in humans and non-human animals have fascinated casual observers as well as scientific researchers at least as far back as Aristotle[1,2] This has motivated widespread investigation into how complex “information” and “meaning” are encoded in vocal signals[3,4,5,6]. The zebra finch (Taeniopygia guttata) is well suited for asking this question since males learn a single highly stereotyped motif, comprised of 3–8 harmonic syllables in a fixed sequence, which they repeat multiple
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