Bird Songs and Baby Babble

This story is brought to you by BirdNote, a show that airs daily on public radio stations nationwide.

Some birds are born with the ability to sing. But other birds, much like humans and speech, must learn to sing while they're young. 

This is a key distinction: an innate ability versus a learned behavior. And it turns out that vocal learning in songbirds and humans may have more in common than anyone suspected. 

Recent DNA research reveals that songbirds and humans share a consistent set of roughly 50 genes that appear crucial to vocal learning. When these genes are active in humans, they are also active in songbirds. This means that there’s a common pattern that applies to very different creatures that share a need to learn complex song and speech.

The real clincher is that birds that don’t learn songs—and primates that don’t speak—lack this genetic set-up.

Discovery of this genetic commonality was headline news when the research results were published in December 2014. It's a breakthrough in our understanding of the mechanisms involved in vocal learning. And it's possible that because scientists now understand the genetic similarities between speech and birdsong learning, they can use that insight to study human speech acquisition in new ways.

Learn more about the connection between bird songs and baby babble at birdnote.org.

Bird sounds are provided by The Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Willow Flycatcher [112678] recorded by C A Marantz; American Robin [94383] recorded by W L Hershberger. 
'Eureka' by Jim O'Rourke, from the album 'Eureka' 1999 Domino Recording Company.
BirdNote’s theme music was composed and played by Nancy Rumbel and John Kessler.​
Producer: John Kessler
Executive Producer: Dominic Black

Written by Bob Sundstrom

© 2015 Tune In to Nature.org     March 2015     Narrator: Mary McCann