ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2021
Cross-species parallels in babbling: animals and algorithms.
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 17 papers.
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Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed.
- Vocal mimicry in Corvids.Animal cognition · 2025Review
- Maternal behavior influences vocal practice and learning processes in the greater sac-winged bat.eLife · 2025Article
- Vocal sequence diversity and length remain stable across ontogeny in a catarrhine monkey (Cercocebus atys).Communications biology · 2025Article
- Social and individual factors mediate chimpanzee vocal ontogeny.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- "Age of risk" shapes simpler multimodal communication in the juvenile plains zebra (Equus quagga).Communications biology · 2025Article
- Syllable as a Synchronization Mechanism That Makes Human Speech Possible.Brain sciences · 2024Article
- Graded calls of the smallest terrestrial mammal, the Etruscan shrew, living in a closed habitat.iScience · 2024Article
- Prehatch Calls and Coordinated Birth in Turtles.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- From emotional signals to symbols.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Acoustic behavior of humpback whale calves on the feeding ground: Comparisons across age and implications for vocal development.PloS one · 2024Article
- Features of animal babbling in the vocal ontogeny of the gray mouse lemur (Microcebus murinus).Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Novel sound exposure drives dynamic changes in auditory lateralization that are associated with perceptual learning in zebra finches.Communications biology · 2023Article
- Overcoming bias in the comparison of human language and animal communication.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- A convergent interaction engine: vocal communication among marmoset monkeys.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Review
- Competency in Navigating Arbitrary Spaces as an Invariant for Analyzing Cognition in Diverse Embodiments.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Article
- Vocal learning in animals and humans.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
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9 authors.
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Abstract
A key feature of vocal ontogeny in a variety of taxa with extensive vocal repertoires is a developmental pattern in which vocal exploration is followed by a period of category formation that results in a mature species-specific repertoire. Vocal development preceding the adult repertoire is often called 'babbling', a term used to describe aspects of vocal development in species of vocal-learning birds, some marine mammals, some New World monkeys, some bats and humans. The paper summarizes the results of research on babbling in examples from five taxa and proposes a unifying definition facilitating their comparison. There are notable similarities across these species in the developmental pattern of vocalizations, suggesting that vocal production learning might require babbling. However, the current state of the literature is insufficient to confirm this suggestion. We suggest directions for future research to elucidate this issue, emphasizing the importance of (i) expanding the descriptive data and seeking species with complex mature repertoires where babbling may not occur or may occur only to a minimal extent; (ii) (quasi-)experimental research to tease apart possible mechanisms of acquisition and/or self-organizing development; and (iii) computational modelling as a methodology to test hypotheses about the origins and functions of babbling. This article is part of the theme issue 'Vocal learning in animals and humans'.
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