ArticleNature communications2019
Parallels in the sequential organization of birdsong and human speech.
Article in Nature communications, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 41 papers.
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Who cites it
41 citing papers in PubMed, 91 citations in OpenAlex.
- Language-like properties in the vocal behavior of animals.Current opinion in neurobiology · 2026Review
- The Forms and Structures of Chimpanzee Algae Fishing.American journal of primatology · 2026Article
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- Rooks (Corvus frugilegus) can show spontaneous vocal flexibility when exposed to dynamically changing rhythmic sounds.Animal cognition · 2026Article
- The neurobiology of human sequential signal prediction: Insights from language, music, and mathematics.Neuroscience research · 2026Review
- Cultural Transmission Promotes the Emergence of Statistical Properties That Support Language Learning.Cognitive science · 2025Article
- A complex social-acoustical environment supports development and maintenance in the zebra finch auditory pallium.Journal of neurophysiology · 2025Article
- Building Complexity From Simplicity: A Songbird's Vocal Repertoire Varies Among Populations Despite Similarity of Syllables.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Domain general noise reduction for time series signals with Noisereduce.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Behavioral sequences across multiple animal species in the wild share common structural features.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- A bounded hierarchy framework for the evolution of syntax.Biology & philosophy · 2025Article
- Beyond bigrams: call sequencing in the common marmoset (Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Bidirectional generative adversarial representation learning for natural stimulus synthesis.Journal of neurophysiology · 2024Article
- Goal-directed and flexible modulation of syllable sequence within birdsong.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Language-like efficiency and structure in house finch song.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Auditory Feature-based Perceptual Distance.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Article
- Nonadjacent dependencies and sequential structure of chimpanzee action during a natural tool-use task.PeerJ · 2024Article
- Cortical speech tracking is related to individual prediction tendencies.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2023Article
- Task-irrelevant auditory metre shapes visuomotor sequential learning.Psychological research · 2023Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Human speech possesses a rich hierarchical structure that allows for meaning to be altered by words spaced far apart in time. Conversely, the sequential structure of nonhuman communication is thought to follow non-hierarchical Markovian dynamics operating over only short distances. Here, we show that human speech and birdsong share a similar sequential structure indicative of both hierarchical and Markovian organization. We analyze the sequential dynamics of song from multiple songbird species and speech from multiple languages by modeling the information content of signals as a function of the sequential distance between vocal elements. Across short sequence-distances, an exponential decay dominates the information in speech and birdsong, consistent with underlying Markovian processes. At longer sequence-distances, the decay in information follows a power law, consistent with underlying hierarchical processes. Thus, the sequential organization of acoustic elements in two learned vocal communication signals (speech and birdsong) shows functionally equivalent dynamics, governed by similar processes.
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