Psycholinguistics Supper: Dr. Ofer Tchernichovski
Tuesday 04 September, 2012
6:30 - 8pm, $0
The Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue, Room 7102
Vocal Learning in Songbirds and Human Infants
The ability to rearrange vocal elements into sequences that match sensory templates is the cornerstone of human speech and of birdsong. After a discussion of the qualitative and quantitative characteristics of bird songs, I present work from our laboratory on how the combinatorial ability of songbirds comes about in the course of vocal development. We trained juvenile zebra finches to perform one song and then altered the training target so that it prompted them to swap syllable order or to insert a new syllable into a string. By recording the entire vocal output of the birds during the learning process, we can examine how they solve these permutation tasks. That in turn allows a comparative analysis of vocal development (babbling) across human infants and songbirds.
The ability to rearrange vocal elements into sequences that match sensory templates is the cornerstone of human speech and of birdsong. After a discussion of the qualitative and quantitative characteristics of bird songs, I present work from our laboratory on how the combinatorial ability of songbirds comes about in the course of vocal development. We trained juvenile zebra finches to perform one song and then altered the training target so that it prompted them to swap syllable order or to insert a new syllable into a string. By recording the entire vocal output of the birds during the learning process, we can examine how they solve these permutation tasks. That in turn allows a comparative analysis of vocal development (babbling) across human infants and songbirds.