We investigated discrimination by female song sparrows Melospiza melodia, between different categories of male song using the copulation solicitation display as a preference assay. Females responded most strongly to songs recorded from their mates, less strongly to songs of neighbouring males and least strongly to songs of stranger males. Among the stranger songs, however, females preferred son...

Juveniles sometimes learn behaviors that they cease to express as adults. Whether the adult brain retains a record of experiences associated with behaviors performed transiently during development remains unclear. We addressed this issue by studying neural representations of song in swamp sparrows, a species in which juveniles learn and practice many more songs than they retain in their adult v...

Please cite this article in press as: Jill A. Soha (2009), doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2009.02.021 T E D P R O Adult male grasshopper sparrows sing two structurally and functionally distinct songs: buzz song and warble song. To investigate how these songs develop, we tutored three groups of young males in the laboratory: one with recordings, one with live adult tutors and one with no song (isolate bi...

The concept of a macroevolutionary trade-off among sexual signals has a storied history in evolutionary biology. Theory predicts that if multiple sexual signals are costly for males to produce or maintain and females prefer a single, sexually selected trait, then an inverse correlation between sexual signal elaborations is expected among species. However, empirical evidence for what has been te...

We investigated whether song sparrows discriminate foreign from local songs using specific phonologic markers, a mechanism of geographic discrimination previously described for some other songbirds. Song sparrows from Linesville, Pennsylvania (PA) respond more strongly to local songs than to songs from Millbrook, New York (NY). We identify 61 note categories in PA and NY songs, of which 13 are ...

Eastern Screech-Owls (Otus asio) possess a repertoire of two song types, the bounce and the whinny. We examined (1) seasonal variation in the use of these songs in central Kentucky and (2) the responses of male and female screech-owls to the playback of bounce songs. The spontaneous use of bounce songs increased uring February and March, declined in April and May, increased again in June and co...

     The objective of the present study was to identify and examine the influence of instructional tools, namely, games, songs and stories on young Iranian EFL learners’ achievement utilizing a quantitative design. To conduct the study 65 Iranian EFL learners, divided into an experimental group and a control group, learning English at Navid English Institute, Shiraz, Iran, participated in the s...

The available evidence indicates that the music of a culture reflects the speech rhythm of the prevailing language. The normalized pairwise variability index (nPVI) is a measure of durational contrast between successive events that can be applied to vowels in speech and to notes in music. Music-language parallels may have implications for the acquisition of language and music, but it is unclear...

In many oscine species, young males learn songs that match those of their first breeding-season neighbours. Because sharing songs with neighbours may be advantageous, selection should favour birds that retain the capacity to memorize new songs later in their first year as the birds cannot know for sure who their neighbours will be until spring. We investigated whether song sparrows, Melospiza m...

Female cowbirds raised in auditory isolated from males responded to the songs of male cowbirds with copulatory postures. The songs of males reared in isolated were more effective in eliciting the posture than the songs of normally reared males. The females did not respond to the songs of other species. These results indicate one mechanism of species identification for this parasitic species.