ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2021
The many functions of vocal learning.
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed.
- Current Advances in Cetacean Semen Cryopreservation and Their Application to Yangtze Finless Porpoise Conservation.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2026Review
- Unifying the gestural and the vocal in the evolution of culture, the arts, and the brain.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Third-party imitation is not restricted to humans.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- The role of musical pitch in long-distance defensive signaling.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2025Review
- Perceiving temporal structure within and between the senses: A multisensory/crossmodal perspective.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2025Review
- Maternal behavior influences vocal practice and learning processes in the greater sac-winged bat.eLife · 2025Article
- Automatic imitation of intransitive actions in macaws.iScience · 2024Article
- Sex differences in the impact of social relationships on individual vocal signatures in grey mouse lemurs (Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Call combination production is linked to the social environment in Western Australian magpies (Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Individual Differences in Accent Imitation.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2024Article
- The role of sleep disturbances in associations between early life adversity and subsequent brain and language development during childhood.Frontiers in sleep · 2024Article
- Analogies of human speech and bird song: From vocal learning behavior to its neural basis.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Review
- A survey of vocal mimicry in companion parrots.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Vocal production learning in mammals revisited.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
- Vocal learning in animals and humans.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The capacity to learn novel vocalizations has evolved convergently in a wide range of species. Courtship songs of male birds or whales are often treated as prototypical examples, implying a sexually selected context for the evolution of this ability. However, functions of learned vocalizations in different species are far more diverse than courtship, spanning a range of socio-positive contexts from individual identification, social cohesion, or advertising pair bonds, as well as agonistic contexts such as territorial defence, deceptive alarm calling or luring prey. Here, we survey the diverse usages and proposed functions of learned novel signals, to build a framework for considering the evolution of vocal learning capacities that extends beyond sexual selection. For each function that can be identified for learned signals, we provide examples of species using unlearned signals to accomplish the same goals. We use such comparisons to generate hypotheses concerning when vocal learning is adaptive, given a particular suite of socio-ecological traits. Finally, we identify areas of uncertainty where improved understanding would allow us to better test these hypotheses. Considering the broad range of potential functions of vocal learning will yield a richer appreciation of its evolution than a narrow focus on a few prototypical species. This article is part of the theme issue 'Vocal learning in animals and humans'.
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