Alternations and changes from trills to assibilated rhotics have been documented in several Latin American Spanish varieties (e.g. Vidal de Battini 1955, Rissel 1989). Beyond the sociolinguistic variables that may have triggered this change, assibilation can be accounted for by recent articulatory studies on trills (Solé et al. 1998, Solé 2002). These studies show that trills require very preci...

The songs of male Puget Sound white-crowned sparrows currently form about 12 dialects along the Pacific Northwest coast. In his survey of 1970, Baptista (Condor 1977; 79: 356–370) defined six of the dialects based on the song’s terminal trill because most males at each locality shared the simple syllables (SSs) in this trill. The complex syllables (CSs) in the song’s introduction varied among m...

Several studies suggest that 50-kHz ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs) may indicate a positive affective state in rats, and these vocalizations are increasingly being used to investigate the properties of psychoactive drugs. Previous studies, however, have focused on dopaminergic psychostimulants and morphine, whereas little is known about how other drugs modulate 50-kHz USVs. To further elucidate...

Please cite this article in press as: Kroodsm 10.1016/j.anbehav.2016.06.015 Birdsong biologists interested in sexual selection and honest signalling have repeatedly reported confirmation, over more than a decade, of the biological significance of a scatterplot between trill rate and frequency bandwidth. This ‘performance hypothesis’ proposes that the closer a song plots to an upper bound on the...

A new species of treefrog of the Boophis rappiodes group (Anura, Mantellidae) is described from the Sahamalaza - Iles Radama National Park in northwest Madagascar. This new species is green in colour with bright red speckling across its head and dorsum; similar in morphology to other species of this group including: B. bottae, B. rappiodes, B. erythrodactylus and B. tasymena. The new species ca...

Many rhythmic behaviors, such as locomotion and vocalization, involve temporally dynamic patterns. How does the brain generate temporal complexity? Here, we use the vocal central pattern generator (CPG) of Xenopus laevis to address this question. Isolated brains can elicit fictive vocalizations, allowing us to study the CPG in vitro. The X. laevis advertisement call is temporally modulated; cal...

RATIONALE Adult rats emit ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs) at around 50-kHz; these commonly occur in contexts that putatively engender positive affect. While several reports indicate that dopaminergic (DAergic) transmission plays a role in the emission of 50-kHz calls, the pharmacological evidence is mixed. Different modes of dopamine (DA) release (i.e., tonic and phasic) could potentially expla...

The increasing global competitiveness demands the development and improvement of self-quality, particularly quality self-performance. Dysarthria is one speech disorders that often provides significant obstacles to sufferer's performance. For this reason, study was intended as an initial investigate differences in acoustic features both contoid vocoid phonemes produced by dysarthria non-dysarthr...