In our quest to find what makes humans unique, we often compare ourselves with our closest relatives: the great apes. But when it comes to understanding the quintessential human capacity for language, ...
In our quest to find what makes humans unique, we often compare ourselves with our closest relatives: the great apes. But when it comes to understanding the quintessentially human capacity for ...
Zipf’s law of abbreviation explains how commonly spoken words tend to be shorter. The idea is so intuitive, birds appear to ...
Language learning becomes more challenging for people as we age. Children learn languages easily, but this facility begins to decline when we reach our twenties and beyond. Why? To better understand ...
When a bird repeats a melody or mimics a sound, it may seem like simple imitation. In reality, bird singing is a sophisticated process driven by advanced brain functions. Scientists studying bird ...
In our quest to find what makes humans unique, we often compare ourselves with our closest relatives: the great apes. But when it comes to understanding the quintessentially human capacity for ...
Dr Julie Elie of the University of California, Berkeley has won the 2026 Coller-Dolittle Prize, receiving $100,000 for decoding zebra finch vocalisations. She identified 11 core calls and mapped their ...
For decades, scientists have known that only a few groups of birds—songbirds, parrots, and hummingbirds—can learn to produce new sounds. But a new article in The Quarterly Review of Biology reveals ...
Language is one of the most notable abilities humans have. It allows us to express complex meanings and transmit knowledge from generation to generation. An important question in human biology is how ...
Scientists find some parallels with human speech in cheeps and trills of birdsong. If zebra finches notice timbral features more acutely than temporal features, I wonder if certain populations of ...
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