Passerine song learning has become a major model system for the study of vocal learning, and many parallels with human language learning have been noted (Marler 1970; Brainard & Doupe 2002). One parallel that has been appreciated only recently is the key role of social factors in vocal development (Catchpole & Slater 1995; West et al. 1996; Snowdon & Hausberger 1997; Goldstein et al. 2003; Beec...

Please cite this article in press as: Kroodsm 10.1016/j.anbehav.2016.06.015 Birdsong biologists interested in sexual selection and honest signalling have repeatedly reported confirmation, over more than a decade, of the biological significance of a scatterplot between trill rate and frequency bandwidth. This ‘performance hypothesis’ proposes that the closer a song plots to an upper bound on the...

The song-control system in the brain of songbirds is important for the production and acquisition of song and exhibits both remarkable seasonal plasticity and some of the largest neural sex differences observed in vertebrates. We measured sex and seasonal differences in two nuclei of the song-control system of brood-parasitic brown-headed cowbirds (Molothrus ater) and closely-related non-parasi...

Female starlings pair preferentially with males that produce song organized into long bouts. Females exhibit immediate early gene responses in the auditory forebrain that are biased towards longer bout songs. In male starlings, length of song bout correlates with variation in the volume of two key brain areas controlling song production, the HVC and the robust nucleus of the archistriatum (RA)....

As is the case for human speech, birdsong is transmitted across generations by imitative learning. Although transfer of song patterns from adults to juveniles typically occurs via vertical or oblique transmission, there is also evidence of horizontal transmission between juveniles of the same generation. Here, we show that a young male zebra finch (Taeniopygia guttata) that has been exposed to ...

35 In adult male zebra finches, transecting the vocal nerve causes previously stable (i.e., 36 crystallized) song to slowly degrade, presumably because of the resulting distortion in 37 auditory feedback. How and where distorted feedback interacts with song motor 38 networks to induce this process of song decrystallization remains unknown. The song 39 premotor nucleus HVC is a potential site wh...

Previous studies detected an influence of urban characteristics on song traits in passerine birds, that is, song adjustments to ambient noise in urban areas. Several studies already described the effect of weather conditions on the behavior of birds, but not the effect on song traits. We investigate, if song trait variability changes along a continuous urbanity gradient in Frankfurt am Main, Ge...

Physiological studies in vocal animals such as songbirds indicate that vocalizations drive auditory neurons particularly well. But the neural mechanisms whereby vocalizations are encoded differently from other sounds in the auditory system are unknown. We used spectrotemporal receptive fields (STRFs) to study the neural encoding of song versus the encoding of a generic sound, modulation-limited...

Accurate song perception is likely to be as important for female songbirds as it is for male songbirds. Male zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata) show differential ZENK expression to conspecific and heterospecific songs by day 30 posthatch in auditory perceptual brain regions such as the caudomedial nidopallium (NCM) and the caudomedial mesopallium (CMM). The current study examined ZENK expressi...

Cultural processes occur in a wide variety of animal taxa, from insects to cetaceans. The songs of humpback whales are one of the most striking examples of the transmission of a cultural trait and social learning in any nonhuman animal. To understand how songs are learned, we investigate rare cases of song hybridization, where parts of an existing song are spliced with a new one, likely before ...