We are all born completely helpless, with little knowledge or skills needed to survive as adults. Our communication skills are also learned almost entirely from our parents and caregivers.
There are also similar animals. Researchers often study zebra finches to better understand how humans develop language, especially because the way zebra finches learn to communicate is very similar to humans.
To answer these questions, Princeton University’s Stephen Elmlinger will present research on early vocalizations in both human infants and zebra finches on Monday, May 11th at 1pm ET as part of the 190th meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, which will be held from May 11th to 15th.
Elmlinger studies vocal learning and summarizes how individuals develop and change their vocalizations to interact with others. He conducted three studies to understand how immature babbling transforms into adult-like speech. Two of the studies involved human infants and the other involved finches.
In his first experiments, he observed infants interacting with their caregivers and noted that adults responded more to continuous vocalizations consisting of multiple syllables than to single-syllable vocalizations. The second study observed 30 infants over several months to determine the role these caregivers play in helping infants learn sequential vocalizations.
We might hypothesize that early learning of vocal sequences is primarily facilitated by motor practice. Previous research suggests that social feedback guides infants’ vocal progress at the level of individual syllables. Here we wanted to know whether social feedback also influences infant vocal order development. ”
Stephen Elmlinger, Princeton University
In this study, he and his colleagues found that caregiver responses to a series of vocalizations significantly increased the rate at which infants learned those vocalizations. By encouraging complex vocalizations, parents can help their children learn faster.
In a third study, Elmlinger repeated the experiment using zebra finches and found the same results. Like humans, zebra finches use social feedback to teach their young.
“Taken together, our results suggest that not only do humans and zebra finches use social feedback to guide the acoustic progression of their vocal repertoire, but that the social environment also guides the low-level temporal basis of their vocal communication,” Elmlinger said.
When it comes to language learning, humans are not as unique as once thought. At least one other species has learned to vocalize the same way we do, and there may be more waiting to be discovered.
“We would love to collaborate with New World monkey, cetacean, and bat scientists,” Elmlinger said. “There are good hints that at least some of these animals should also exhibit socially guided vocal learning. Perhaps it’s not uncommon, it’s just understudied.”
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Acoustical Society of America
