Zebra finches and human infants share similar vocal learning mechanisms

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 caregivers.

Some animals are the same. Zebra finches, in particular, are so similar to humans in how they learn to communicate that researchers often study them to better understand how we develop language.

To help answer these questions, Steven Elmlinger, from Princeton University, will present his research on early vocalizations in both human infants and zebra finches Monday, May 11, at 1 p.m. ET as part of the 190th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, running May 11-15.

Elmlinger studies vocal learning, piecing together how individuals develop and change their vocalizations to interact with others. He conducted three studies, two with human infants and one with finches, to understand how immature babbling transitions into adultlike speech.

In the first experiment, he observed infants interacting with their caregivers, noting that adults respond more to sequential vocalizations comprising multiple syllables than single syllable vocalizations. In the second study, he observed 30 infants across a period of several months to determine the role that these caregivers play in helping infants learn sequential vocalizations.

We might assume that early learning of vocal sequences is primarily driven by motor practice. Prior research suggests social feedback guides infants' vocal advances at the level of individual syllables. Here we wanted to know if social feedback also influences infants' vocal sequence development."

Steven Elmlinger, Princeton University

In this study, he and his colleagues found that caregiver responses to sequential vocalizations significantly increased the rate at which infants learned to produce those sequences. By encouraging complex vocalizations, caregivers could help their children learn faster.

In the third study, Elmlinger repeated this experiment with zebra finches, with the same finding. Like humans, zebra finches use social feedback to teach their young.

"Taken together, our results suggest that not only do both humans and zebra finches use social feedback to guide advances in the acoustics of their vocal repertoire, but their social environment also guides low-level temporal foundations of their vocal communication," said Elmlinger.

When it comes to language learning, humans are not as unique as we once thought. At least one other species learns to vocalize in the same way we do, and there may be others awaiting discovery.

"I would love to collaborate with new-world monkey, cetacean, and bat scientists," said Elmlinger. "There are good hints that at least some of these animals should show socially guided vocal learning as well - perhaps it is not rare, just understudied."