ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2014
The use of network analysis to study complex animal communication systems: a study on nightingale song.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 27 papers.
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27 citing papers in PubMed, 87 citations in OpenAlex.
- Timescales of call variability in a South American treefrog.Journal of comparative physiology. A, Neuroethology, sensory, neural, and behavioral physiology · 2026Article
- Anuran communities increase aggregations of conspecific calls in response to aircraft noise.Current zoology · 2025Article
- Language-like efficiency and structure in house finch song.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Network analysis reveals context-dependent structural complexity of social calls in serrate-legged small treefrogs.Current zoology · 2024Article
- Sex differences in song syntax and syllable diversity in testosterone-induced songs of adult male and female canaries.Biology of sex differences · 2023Article
- Testosterone treatment reveals marked sex differences in song diversity and syllable syntax in adult canaries.Research square · 2023Article
- Syntactic modulation of rhythm in Australian pied butcherbird song.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- NetFACS: Using network science to understand facial communication systems.Behavior research methods · 2022Article
- Social associations in common carp (Ecology and evolution · 2022Article
- Evidence for cumulative cultural evolution in bird song.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
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- Balanced imitation sustains song culture in zebra finches.Nature communications · 2021Article
- Toward a Computational Neuroethology of Vocal Communication: From Bioacoustics to Neurophysiology, Emerging Tools and Future Directions.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2021Review
- Network analysis reveals underlying syntactic features in a vocally learnt mammalian display, humpback whale song.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Volitional control of vocalizations in corvid songbirds.PLoS biology · 2019Article
- Hierarchical temporal structure in music, speech and animal vocalizations: jazz is like a conversation, humpbacks sing like hermit thrushes.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2017Article
- Empirical approaches to the study of language evolution.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2017Review
- How social learning adds up to a culture: from birdsong to human public opinion.The Journal of experimental biology · 2017Review
- Acoustic sequences in non-human animals: a tutorial review and prospectus.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2016Review
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The singing of song birds can form complex signal systems comprised of numerous subunits sung with distinct combinatorial properties that have been described as syntax-like. This complexity has inspired inquiries into similarities of bird song to human language; but the quantitative analysis and description of song sequences is a challenging task. In this study, we analysed song sequences of common nightingales (Luscinia megarhynchos) by means of a network analysis. We translated long nocturnal song sequences into networks of song types with song transitions as connectors. As network measures, we calculated shortest path length and transitivity and identified the 'small-world' character of nightingale song networks. Besides comparing network measures with conventional measures of song complexity, we also found a correlation between network measures and age of birds. Furthermore, we determined the numbers of in-coming and out-going edges of each song type, characterizing transition patterns. These transition patterns were shared across males for certain song types. Playbacks with different transition patterns provided first evidence that these patterns are responded to differently and thus play a role in singing interactions. We discuss potential functions of the network properties of song sequences in the framework of vocal leadership. Network approaches provide biologically meaningful parameters to describe the song structure of species with extremely large repertoires and complex rules of song retrieval.
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