Vocal ontogeny in songbirds provides a good model for understanding how complex motor behavior, including speech, is learned. For birdsong, as for other motor learning, it has generally been assumed that a subject's motor output at any point during learning represents what the subject has learned to produce by that time. Here, we show, however, that juvenile zebra finches partway through song l...

Many songbirds learn their songs early in life from a song model. In the absence of such a model, they develop an improvised song that often lacks the species-typical song structure. Open-ended learners, such as the domesticated canary, are able to modify their songs in adulthood, although the mechanisms that guide and time the song-learning process are still not fully understood. In a previous...

Songbirds, such as zebra finches, learn their song from a tutor early in life. Forebrain nuclei in the "song system" are important for the acquisition and production of song. Brain regions [including the caudomedial part of the neostriatum (NCM) and of the hyperstriatum ventrale (CMHV)] outside the song system show increased neuronal activation, measured as expression of immediate early genes (...

Auditory evoked potentials were recorded from the surface of the brain in young swamp and song sparrows. Responses to pure tones indicate that both species have similar auditory sensitivity during the sensitive period for song learning. Responses to the song syllables extracted from the normal adult song of both species show evidence of hemispheric differences for swamp sparrows listening to co...

The song control region in the avian forebrain is a series of discrete, interconnected nuclei mediating song learning and production. It has been studied in males or in species where both sexes sing. Little is known about the neural correlates of song perception in nonsinging females, often the intended recipients of song. We studied cowbirds (Molothrus ater), a species in which only males sing...

How well a songbird learns a song appears to depend on the formation of a robust auditory template of its tutor's song. Using functional magnetic resonance neuroimaging we examine auditory responses in two groups of zebra finches that differ in the type of song they sing after being tutored by birds producing stuttering-like syllable repetitions in their songs. We find that birds that learn to ...

Song-type matching, a behaviour of some songbirds in which one individual replies to another’s song with a matching song type, has been studied primarily in birds that have small to moderately sized song repertoires (<15 song types) and that share only a few song types with neighbours. Few previous studies have examined song-type matching in species with very large song repertoires, in which bi...

Neural mechanisms for representing complex communication sounds must solve the problem of encoding multiple and potentially overlapping signals. Birdsong provides an excellent model for such processing, in that many songbird species produce multiple song types. Although auditory song representations in single song type species have been studied, how song is represented in the brains of species ...

Bird song is a prominent example of a trait under interand intrasexual selection. Performance-related aspects of bird song have been shown to vary among males and to influence territorial interactions as well as female mate choice. In oscine songbirds, song is different from many other sexually selected traits in that it is learned. As a result of learning, territorial neighbors share songs in ...