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 studying how these animals ...
Evolution
Feb 29, 2024
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280
Humans appear to be one of the only animals capable of speech, which requires a range of skills and mental abilities. Among them, vocal learning—the ability to learn to produce new sounds—is critical for developing language. ...
Plants & Animals
Dec 9, 2022
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5
While most animals don't learn their vocalizations, everyone knows that parrots do—they are excellent mimics of human speech. But how large is the vocabulary of different parrot species? Do males "talk" more than females? ...
Plants & Animals
Dec 5, 2022
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344
Researchers led by Matthew Fuxjager at Brown University, U.S. and Eric Schuppe at Wake Forest University, U.S. have found regions in the woodpecker forebrain that show characteristics that until now have only been associated ...
Plants & Animals
Sep 20, 2022
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423
A trio of researchers, two with the University of Georgia, the third with Zoo Atlanta, has found that gorillas at the zoo have created a new call for use in communicating with humans—usually those holding food. Roberta ...
Most animals produce calls that reflect their body size. A larger animal will sound lower-pitched because its vocal tract, the air-filled tube that produces and filters sounds, is longer. But harbor seals do not always sound ...
Plants & Animals
Apr 29, 2022
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10
Why are some animals good at learning sounds? Did this skill appear when animals started "faking" their body size by lowering calls? In a new study on a wide range of mammals, Andrea Ravignani from the Max Planck Institute ...
Plants & Animals
Nov 16, 2021
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87
Some songbirds learn to sing by listening to other birds. Some other animals can learn to copy sounds. But what does that tell us about human speech? Sonja Vernes from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen ...
Plants & Animals
Sep 6, 2021
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194
That a parrot can copycat sounds is nothing new. But vocal learning is not common in animals. Researcher Carel ten Cate of the Institute of Biology Leiden (IBL) of Leiden University has now discovered a duck species that ...
Plants & Animals
Sep 6, 2021
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63
Musical masterworks such as the Queen of the Night's Aria from Mozart's The Magic Flute, are examples of the sounds trained human voices can produce. The precondition for vocal virtuosity as well as for any spoken word is ...
Plants & Animals
Jan 6, 2021
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