Abstract
Songbird vocal learning has interesting behavioural and neural parallels with speech acquisition in human infants. Zebra finch males sing one unique song that they imitate from conspecific males, and both sexes learn to recognize their father's song. Although males copy the stereotyped syllable sequence of their father's song, the role of sequential information in recognition remains unclear. Here, we investigated father's song recognition after changing the serial order of syllables (switching the middle syllables, first and last syllables, or playing all syllables in inverse order). Behavioural approach and call responses of adult male and female zebra finches to their father's versus unfamiliar songs in playback tests demonstrated significant recognition of father's song with all syllable-order manipulations. We then measured behavioural responses to normal versus inversed-order father's song. In line with our first results, the subjects did not differentiate between the two. Interestingly, when males' strength of song learning was taken into account, we found a significant correlation between song imitation scores and the approach responses to the father's song. These findings suggest that syllable sequence is not essential for recognition of father's song in zebra finches, but that it does affect responsiveness of males in proportion to the strength of vocal learning. This article is part of the theme issue 'Vocal learning in animals and humans'.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1-7 |
| Journal | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences |
| Volume | 376 |
| Issue number | 1836 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 25 Oct 2021 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:Ethics. Experimental procedures were in compliance with the European law and approved by the Animal Experiments Committee of Utrecht University (DEC no. 2011.I.10.093). Data accessibility. The data are provided in the electronic supplementary material [33]. Authors’ contributions. C.M., S.M. and J.J.B. conceived and designed the study; C.M. carried out data collection and C.M. and S.M. performed data analysis; C.M., S.M and J.J.B. interpreted results and wrote the manuscript. All authors gave final approval for publication. Competing interests. We declare we have no competing interests. Funding. This study was supported by Veni fellowship by The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) (grant no. 016.Veni.192.226), Consortium on Individual Development (CID) through the Gravitation programme of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (grant no. 024.001.003) and Dynamics of Youth (DoY) strategic research programme of Utrecht University. Acknowledgements. We thank Thijs Zandbergen for his assistance in the laboratory, Lisa Fijn and Nikki Thie for scoring the behaviour of the birds in the videos, Rosanne Beukeboom for help with additional testing, and Laurens Homs for assistance with creating the song stimuli. We are grateful to Gabriel Beckers, Sara van Erp, Martin Everaert, Sita ter Haar, Ellen Hamaker, René Kager and Katharina Riebel for valuable discussions.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 The Authors.
Keywords
- auditory song memory
- phonotaxis
- song recognition
- songbirds
- syllable sequence
- tutor song