Abstract
Songbirds are one of the few vertebrate groups (including humans) that evolved the ability to learn vocalizations. During song learning, social interactions with adult models are crucial and young songbirds raised without direct contacts with adults typically produce abnormal songs showing phonological and syntactical deficits. This raises the question of what functional representation of their vocalizations such deprived animals develop. Here we show that young starlings that we raised without any direct contact with adults not only failed to differentiate starlings' typical song classes in their vocalizations but also failed to develop differential neural responses to these songs. These deficits appear to be linked to a failure to acquire songs' functions and may provide a model for abnormal development of communicative skills, including speech.
Highlights
Like speech, is a learned behaviour whose development critically depends on social interactions [1,2]
ClassI songs are subdivided into 4 main types or themes that are sung by all male starlings and that are used in species and population recognition in the wild [11,17]
They are mainly used in long-distance vocal interactions between males [11], and they are hardly produced by captive birds, either wild-caught or handraised [3,4,12]
Summary
Like speech, is a learned behaviour whose development critically depends on social interactions [1,2]. We have observed differential responses to the ethologically-defined starlings’ classes of songs in the NCM of adult male starlings [38], which suggests that this non-primary, associative auditory area could well be the place for sorting sounds into functional categories in the songbird brain.
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