What is the long-term vocal effect of that year spent in France at the impressionable age of 2 yr? Will you be able to order a meal in French when you return to Paris 20 yr later? Yazaki-Sugiyama and Mooney (this issue p. 2771–2788) have looked at the neurophysiological correlates of such early auditory and vocal experiences in a songbird, the zebra finch, that was raised with two successive tu...

According to a controversial hypothesis, a characteristic unique to human language is recursion. Contradicting this hypothesis, it has been claimed that the starling, one of the two animal species tested for this ability to date, is able to distinguish acoustic stimuli based on the presence or absence of a center-embedded recursive structure. In our experiment we show that another songbird spec...

Humans and songbirds are among the rare animal groups that exhibit socially learned vocalizations: speech and song, respectively. These vocal-learning capacities share a reliance on audition and cortico-basal ganglia circuitry, as well as neurogenetic mechanisms. Notably, the transcription factors Forkhead box proteins 1 and 2 (FoxP1, FoxP2) exhibit similar expression patterns in the cortex and...

Abstract Social information gathered by observing others often supplements personal collected from direct interactions with the physical environment during decision-making. use may be particularly beneficial in harsh environments or if resources are distributed patchily, ephemeral, and unpredictable, hence difficult to locate. We experimentally tested of acoustic cues wild zebra finches (Taenio...

Songbirds share some essential traits but are extraordinarily diverse, allowing comparative analyses aimed at identifying specific genotype-phenotype associations. This diversity encompasses traits like vocal communication and complex social behaviors that are of great interest to humans, but that are not well represented in other accessible research organisms. Many songbirds are readily observ...