ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2020
A taxonomy for vocal learning.
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 47 papers.
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Who cites it
47 citing papers in PubMed.
- Female Budgerigars Attend Equally to Rhythmic Beat or Repetition, While Humans Prioritize Their Combination.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2026Article
- Task learning drives adaptive vocal adjustments in echolocating bats.Zoological research · 2026Article
- Review
- Detection, communication, and individual identification with deep audio embeddings: A case study with North Atlantic right whales.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Assessing the Role of Vocal Plasticity in Sociospatial Coordination.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2026Review
- Vocal convergence during formation of social relationships in vampire bats.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Comparative genomics sheds light on mammalian and avian gene regulation and phenotypic evolution.Nature communications · 2025Article
- The role of musical pitch in long-distance defensive signaling.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2025Review
- Comparative approaches to the neurobiology of avian vocal learning.Current opinion in neurobiology · 2025Review
- CHIRP-Seq: FOXP2 transcriptional targets in zebra finch brain include numerous speech and language-related genes.BMC neuroscience · 2025Article
- Vocal sequence diversity and length remain stable across ontogeny in a catarrhine monkey (Cercocebus atys).Communications biology · 2025Article
- Emotion in Nonverbal Communication: Comparing Animal and Human Vocalizations and Human Text Messages.Emotion review : journal of the International Society for Research on Emotion · 2025Article
- Visually-guided compensation of deafening-induced song deterioration.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Beat-based dancing to music has evolutionary foundations in advanced vocal learning.BMC neuroscience · 2024Review
- Role of auditory feedback for vocal production learning in the Egyptian fruit bat.Current biology : CB · 2024Article
- Vocal convergence and social proximity shape the calls of the most basal Passeriformes, New Zealand Wrens.Communications biology · 2024Article
- Vocal learning-associated convergent evolution in mammalian proteins and regulatory elements.Science (New York, N.Y.) · 2024Article
- Anterior forebrain pathway in parrots is necessary for producing learned vocalizations with individual signatures.Current biology : CB · 2023Article
- Elephants as an animal model for self-domestication.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Analogies of human speech and bird song: From vocal learning behavior to its neural basis.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Review
Corrections and comments
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1 author.
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Abstract
Humans and songbirds learn to sing or speak by listening to acoustic models, forming auditory templates, and then learning to produce vocalizations that match the templates. These taxa have evolved specialized telencephalic pathways to accomplish this complex form of vocal learning, which has been reported for very few other taxa. By contrast, the acoustic structure of most animal vocalizations is produced by species-specific vocal motor programmes in the brainstem that do not require auditory feedback. However, many mammals and birds can learn to fine-tune the acoustic features of inherited vocal motor patterns based upon listening to conspecifics or noise. These limited forms of vocal learning range from rapid alteration based on real-time auditory feedback to long-term changes of vocal repertoire and they may involve different mechanisms than complex vocal learning. Limited vocal learning can involve the brainstem, mid-brain and/or telencephalic networks. Understanding complex vocal learning, which underpins human speech, requires careful analysis of which species are capable of which forms of vocal learning. Selecting multiple animal models for comparing the neural pathways that generate these different forms of learning will provide a richer view of the evolution of complex vocal learning and the neural mechanisms that make it possible. This article is part of the theme issue 'What can animal communication teach us about human language?'
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