For decades, scientists have known that only a few groups of birds—songbirds, parrots, and hummingbirds—can learn to produce new sounds. But a new article in The Quarterly Review of Biology reveals ...

Shared learning method: Human infants and zebra finches both develop complex vocalizations through social feedback from caregivers or adult birds. Experiments across species: Three studies—two with ...

We are all born completely helpless, with little of the knowledge and skills we will need to survive as adults. Even our ability to communicate is almost entirely learned from our parents or ...

Scientists have identified neurons in the songbird brain that convey the auditory feedback needed to learn a song. Their research lays the foundation for improving human speech, for example, in people ...

The vocalizations of humans, bats, whales, seals and songbirds vastly differ from each other. Humans and birds, for example, are separated by some 300 million years of evolution. But scientists ...

A symphony of synapses fires every time a songbird sings. For Erich Jarvis, a neurobiologist at Rockefeller University, the neural pathways he finds particularly interesting inside a bird’s brain are ...

The neuroscientist Erich Jarvis discovered that songbirds' vocal skills and humans' spoken language are both rooted in neural pathways for controlling learned movements. When Erich Jarvis, a ...

Human speech is often considered one of the traits that sets our species apart. While many animals communicate with sounds, human language relies on a unique combination of anatomy, brain wiring, and ...

Recently, two native Australian birds have stolen the limelight with their impressive vocal imitations. A superb lyrebird called Echo at Sydney’s Taronga Zoo has produced a painfully realistic vocal ...