On Wednesday, September 15, 2021 at 11:05:36 AM UTC-4, DD'eDeN aka note/nickname/alas_my_loves wrote:
On Wednesday, September 15, 2021 at 9:06:56 AM UTC-4, Pandora wrote:
On Tue, 14 Sep 2021 08:58:21 -0700 (PDT), "DD'eDeN aka note/nickname/alas_my_loves" <daud....@gmail.com> wrote:
You bloody fool!
https://www.reuters.com/lifestyle/oddly-enough/all-jokes-aside-scientists-find-talking-duck-2021-09-10/
Vocal learning in waterfowl
Try throwing a temper tantrum:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quqepTj1Q08
Amazing. The next video even more so, chainsaws, car horns...
.
Ducky, birdy, batty: arboreal bats babble in prep for courtship song
Babbling in a vocal learning bat resembles human infant babbling
Ahana Fernandez cs 2021
Science 373:923-6 doi 10.1126/science.abf9279
Babbling is a production milestone in infant speech development. Evidence for babbling in non-human mammals is scarce,
this has prevented cross-spp comparisons.
In this study, we investigated the conspicuous babbling behavior of Saccopteryx bilineata, a bat capable of vocal production learning.
We analyzed the babbling of 20 bat pups in the field during their 3-month ontogeny, and compared its features to those that characterize babbling in human infants.
Our findings demonstrate:
babbling in bat pups is characterized by the same 8 features as babbling in human infants, e.g.
the conspicuous features reduplication & rhythmicity.
These parallels in vocal ontogeny between 2 mammalian spp offer future possibilities for comparison of cognitive & neuro-molecular mechanisms & adaptive functions of babbling in bats & humans.
_____
https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/baby-talk-bat-pups-babble-like-human-infants-69114?utm_campaign=TS_OTC_2021&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=159821067&_hsenc=p2ANqtz--CHjyYd9mM8XHs7h3-k-2U-saSNPqQvNA90MCpxGtZ067qpGr8LyQHHzea4PNCf6Gruog5EzWz-G_
S7MSPy1o0BnnP7Q&utm_content=159821067&utm_source=hs_email
Baby Talk:
Bat Pups Babble Like Human Infants
By studying the vocal behavior of 20 baby bats from birth to weaning, researchers have identified striking similarities between how young humans & bats develop communication skills.
Before sunrise, Ahana Fernandez walks into a Costa Rican forest, carefully sets up her recording equipment near a grove of trees, then waits & watches.
The trees are nurseries for the greater sac-winged bat Saccopteryx bilineata, where each mother bat roosts close to her pup.
When Fernandez notices one of the baby bats opening its mouth to chatter, she points her camera & microphone in its direction to listen in.
After following the same 20 pups from birth to weaning, recording & analyzing their tiny utterances, Fernandez cs made an observation (Science):
infant bats babble in much the same way human infants do.
Babbling isn’t the same as crying or trying to communicate something to an adult — Fernandez calls it “vocal play”.
Human babbling happens when babies play with the building-blocks of language, by practicing certain sounds or syllables before being able to string them into coherent words & phrases — the same way they play with toy blocks, before being able to build
elaborate structures.
Sonja Vernes (not involved with the research):
“Babbling is meant to be this really important phase of development that we have to do as humans on the route to speech.”
Fernandez (postdoc Nat.Hist.Mus.Berlin):
Other researchers (including co-author Mirjam Knörnschild) had suspected bats of babbling before this study.
But this is the first time the vocalizations have been fully characterized & compared to human babbling, which includes traits such as repetition & rhythmicity.
Michael Yartsev (neuro-biologist, not involved):
“People have known about this before, but this was the first description of this in a really clear & elegant manner.”
Fernandez notes: in her study, the babbling
- was often initiated by the pups,
- could last for several minutes.
Outside of humans, babbling is actually quite rare.
With this new study, bats join a small group of babbling spp,
e.g. songbirds, pygmy marmosets.
The authors note:
Egyptian fruit-bat babies may also be babblers,
but that hasn’t been confirmed yet,
and no other bat spp are known to babble.
Fernandez:
Greater sac-winged bats
- roost in trees in small family units,
- are active during the day,
this made them an attractive study candidate.
Fernandez cs did their field work at study sites in Panama & Costa Rica over the course of multiple breeding seasons.
At all observation sites, they undertook a careful process to habituate the colony to their presence, gradually approaching the bats, spending more & more time near them over the 2 weeks before the pups were born.
It required a lot of patience + the occasional fending off of boa constrictors.
Vernes:
it’s very valuable to observe the animals in their natural environments:
“I think that was really impressive to produce this data-set in such challenging conditions.”
Fernandez:
the vocal repertoire of adult bats includes 25 distinct syllables, defined as a sound sandwiched by silence.
These syllables can be mixed & matched into complex “songs” for mating & territory defense & communication between a mother & her pups.
By recording & analyzing how the pup chatter changed over time, Fernandez cs identified several syllables from the adult repertoire that the pups incorporated into their babbling:
there is an initial spurt in syllable acquisition soon after the pups start babbling - this seems to taper off over time.
Fernandez notes that none of the pups mastered all 25 syllables by the time of weaning:
“The same subset of syllables is also completely missing in all of the pups. And those syllables belong to the courtship song.”
She says the pups can produce some of the syllables from the song, but “the entire full-blown courtship song only happens during mating season”,
this suggests that perhaps the pups aren’t acquiring those syllables simply because they aren’t hearing them during their babbling phase.
She speculates that as the pups mature, there could be hormonal cues that help them learn the language of love only once they’re old enough to need it.
Because so few animal spp exhibit this human-like patterns of vocal learning by imitation & babbling, sac-winged bats could be a useful model for learning more about language skill acquisition, says Fernandez:
“I think we can learn many things about our own language by investigating biological foundations of language in other spp.”
In contrast to human babies, bat pups can be used for invasive studies to learn which genes or neurons control vocal learning behavior — and can even potentially be used to model language learning disorders.
Vernes:
“Like with a mouse, you can get really deep into the mechanistic underpinnings of these things ... you’re a bit limited in how much time you can put a baby in an MRI scanner.”
Now that she knows more about pup babbling in the wild, Fernandez says she wants to take her studies into the lab, to study how social influences affect the rate of language learning & about the molecular foundations of babbling:
“By studying their communication, I get a small glance into their cognitive world — how they might perceive the world [and] what the world looks like to them, I think this is so intriguing.”
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