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Statistical learning in songbirds : from self-tutoring to song culture
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Fehér, Olga, Ljubičić, Iva, Suzuki, Kenta, Okanoya, Kazuo and Tchernichovski, Ofer (2017) Statistical learning in songbirds : from self-tutoring to song culture. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 372 (1711). 20160053. doi:10.1098/rstb.2016.0053 ISSN 0962-8436.
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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2016.0053
Abstract
At the onset of vocal development, both songbirds and humans produce variable vocal babbling with broadly distributed acoustic features. Over development, these vocalizations differentiate into the well-defined, categorical signals that characterize adult vocal behaviour. A broadly distributed signal is ideal for vocal exploration, that is, for matching vocal production to the statistics of the sensory input. The developmental transition to categorical signals is a gradual process during which the vocal output becomes differentiated and stable. But does it require categorical input? We trained juvenile zebra finches with playbacks of their own developing song, produced just a few moments earlier, updated continuously over development. Although the vocalizations of these self-tutored (ST) birds were initially broadly distributed, birds quickly developed categorical signals, as fast as birds that were trained with a categorical, adult song template. By contrast, siblings of those birds that received no training (isolates) developed phonological categories much more slowly and never reached the same level of category differentiation as their ST brothers. Therefore, instead of simply mirroring the statistical properties of their sensory input, songbirds actively transform it into distinct categories. We suggest that the early self-generation of phonological categories facilitates the establishment of vocal culture by making the song easier to transmit at the micro level, while promoting stability of shared vocabulary at the group level over generations.
Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||||||
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Divisions: | Faculty of Science, Engineering and Medicine > Science > Psychology | ||||||||
Journal or Publication Title: | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences | ||||||||
Publisher: | The Royal Society Publishing | ||||||||
ISSN: | 0962-8436 | ||||||||
Official Date: | January 2017 | ||||||||
Dates: |
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Volume: | 372 | ||||||||
Number: | 1711 | ||||||||
Article Number: | 20160053 | ||||||||
DOI: | 10.1098/rstb.2016.0053 | ||||||||
Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||||||
Publication Status: | Published | ||||||||
Access rights to Published version: | Open Access (Creative Commons) |
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