ArticlePLoS biology2017
Crowd vocal learning induces vocal dialects in bats: Playback of conspecifics shapes fundamental frequency usage by pups.
Article in PLoS biology, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 29 papers.
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29 citing papers in PubMed, 66 citations in OpenAlex.
- Task learning drives adaptive vocal adjustments in echolocating bats.Zoological research · 2026Article
- Geographic and genetic factors shape acoustic divergence and dialect-like variation in communication calls in the greater horseshoe bats.Zoological research · 2026Article
- Dialect Formation in Ghost Bats: Genetic, Geographic and Morphological Drivers of Social and Echolocation Call Divergence.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Generative vocal plasticity in chimpanzees.iScience · 2025Article
- Evolution of the syrinx of Apodiformes, including the vocal-learning Trochilidae (Aves: Strisores).Zoological journal of the Linnean Society · 2024Article
- Role of auditory feedback for vocal production learning in the Egyptian fruit bat.Current biology : CB · 2024Article
- Article
- Vocal learning-associated convergent evolution in mammalian proteins and regulatory elements.Science (New York, N.Y.) · 2024Article
- Bats possess the anatomical substrate for a laryngeal motor cortex.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2023Article
- Mutual mother-pup acoustic identification in Asian particolored bats.Ecology and evolution · 2022Article
- Genomewide Analysis and Biological Characterization of Cathelicidins with Potent Antimicrobial Activity and Low Cytotoxicity from Three Bat Species.Antibiotics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- A unifying mechanism governing inter-brain neural relationship during social interactions.eLife · 2022Article
- Hearing, echolocation, and beam steering from day 0 in tongue-clicking bats.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- A researcher's guide to the comparative assessment of vocal production learning.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Vocal production learning in mammals revisited.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
- Fruit bats adjust their foraging strategies to urban environments to diversify their diet.BMC biology · 2021Article
- Identification, Analysis and Characterization of Base Units of Bird Vocal Communication: The White Spectacled Bulbul (Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2021Article
- A comprehensive annotation and differential expression analysis of short and long non-coding RNAs in 16 bat genomes.NAR genomics and bioinformatics · 2020Article
- A Hierarchy of Autonomous Systems for Vocal Production.Trends in neurosciences · 2020Review
- A taxonomy for vocal learning.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Review
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Vocal learning, the substrate of human language acquisition, has rarely been described in other mammals. Often, group-specific vocal dialects in wild populations provide the main evidence for vocal learning. While social learning is often the most plausible explanation for these intergroup differences, it is usually impossible to exclude other driving factors, such as genetic or ecological backgrounds. Here, we show the formation of dialects through social vocal learning in fruit bats under controlled conditions. We raised 3 groups of pups in conditions mimicking their natural roosts. Namely, pups could hear their mothers' vocalizations but were also exposed to a manipulation playback. The vocalizations in the 3 playbacks mainly differed in their fundamental frequency. From the age of approximately 6 months and onwards, the pups demonstrated distinct dialects, where each group was biased towards its playback. We demonstrate the emergence of dialects through social learning in a mammalian model in a tightly controlled environment. Unlike in the extensively studied case of songbirds where specific tutors are imitated, we demonstrate that bats do not only learn their vocalizations directly from their mothers, but that they are actually influenced by the sounds of the entire crowd. This process, which we term "crowd vocal learning," might be relevant to many other social animals such as cetaceans and pinnipeds.
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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.