Songbirds recognize songs the way humans recognize vowels

The expression of a Faroese starling who's listened to too much vocoder. (credit: flickr user: Arne List)

Humans are obviously pretty special when it comes to language. One of our cleverest tricks is the ability to process the sounds of spoken language at high speed—even more remarkable when you consider just how variable these sounds are. People have very different voices and very differently shaped throats and mouths, which all affect the sound waves that come out of them. And yet we have very little trouble communicating with speech.

There are many ways to try to figure out how this wizardry evolved, but one particularly useful source of information is birds. Their evolutionary relationship to humans goes pretty far back on the family tree, so anything unusual we have in common with them—like vocal learning—is unlikely to be because of our shared genetic history. Instead, it's more likely to result from similar evolutionary pressures causing both of us to hit on the similar solutions.

This is why a paper in this week's PNAS is so fascinating: it found that songbirds process sounds in a way that is very similar to humans. Like us, they're able to process how all the complex frequencies bound up in a single sound relate to one another. It’s very close to how humans process vowels.

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