ArticleScience advances2015
Vocal learning in a social mammal: Demonstrated by isolation and playback experiments in bats.
Article in Science advances, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 54 papers.
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Who cites it
54 citing papers in PubMed, 116 citations in OpenAlex.
- Task learning drives adaptive vocal adjustments in echolocating bats.Zoological research · 2026Article
- Neurons in the bat auditory cortex encode class and complexity of future vocalizations.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Assessing the Role of Vocal Plasticity in Sociospatial Coordination.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2026Review
- Neural Bases of Collective Social Behavior and Group Interactions across Species.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Review
- Leveraging artificial intelligence in bioacoustics for animal health monitoring and early diagnosis in veterinary medicine.Frontiers in veterinary science · 2026Review
- Dialect Formation in Ghost Bats: Genetic, Geographic and Morphological Drivers of Social and Echolocation Call Divergence.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Vocal convergence during formation of social relationships in vampire bats.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Building Complexity From Simplicity: A Songbird's Vocal Repertoire Varies Among Populations Despite Similarity of Syllables.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Role of auditory feedback for vocal production learning in the Egyptian fruit bat.Current biology : CB · 2024Article
- Establishing Primary and Stable Cell Lines from Frozen Wing Biopsies for Cellular, Physiological, and Genetic Studies in Bats.Current protocols · 2024Article
- Article
- Bats.Nature methods · 2024Article
- Vocal learning-associated convergent evolution in mammalian proteins and regulatory elements.Science (New York, N.Y.) · 2024Article
- Establishing Primary and Stable Cell Lines from Frozen Wing Biopsies for Cellular, Physiological, and Genetic Studies in Bats.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Features of animal babbling in the vocal ontogeny of the gray mouse lemur (Microcebus murinus).Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Bats possess the anatomical substrate for a laryngeal motor cortex.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2023Article
- The continued importance of comparative auditory research to modern scientific discovery.Hearing research · 2023Review
- What do mammals have to say about the neurobiology of acoustic communication?Molecular psychology : brain, behavior, and society · 2023Article
- Optionality in animal communication: a novel framework for examining the evolution of arbitrariness.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2022Article
- The pale spear-nosed bat: A neuromolecular and transgenic model for vocal learning.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The evolution of human language is shrouded in mystery as it is unparalleled in the animal kingdom. Whereas vocal learning is crucial for the development of speech in humans, it seems rare among nonhuman animals. Songbirds often serve as a model for vocal learning, but the lack of a mammalian model hinders our quest for the origin of this capability. We report the influence of both isolation and playback experiments on the vocal development of a mammal, the Egyptian fruit bat. We continuously recorded pups from birth to adulthood and found that, when raised in a colony, pups acquired the adult repertoire, whereas when acoustically isolated, they exhibited underdeveloped vocalizations. Isolated pups that heard bat recordings exhibited a repertoire that replicated the playbacks they were exposed to. These findings demonstrate vocal learning in a social mammal, and suggest bats as a model for language acquisition.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.