Jackass penguins have a jackass language not so different from English

By Brandon Specktor - Senior Writer 17 hours ago

The braying songs of African "jackass" penguins follow two extremely common rules of human language.

African penguins (Spheniscus demersus) bear the unfortunate nickname "jackass penguins" because they communicate through honking, donkey-like brays. Laugh at them if you like, but a new study suggests that their jackass language actually follows the same basic linguistic rules as ours.

In the study, published Wednesday (Feb. 5) in the journal Biology Letters, researchers recorded nearly 600 vocalizations from 28 adult male penguins living in Italian zoos. (Males tend to vocalize a lot during the mating period, which is why the researchers turned to this population). The scientists knew from prior research that African penguins honk using three distinct types of sound, reminiscent of human syllables, when greeting one another, mating, or defending territory. But the researchers wanted to know whether those "syllables" followed two common linguistic rules.

One of those rules, called Zipf's law of brevity, was proposed in 1945 by linguist George Zipf. The law states that the more frequently a word is used in any language, the shorter it tends to be (think of words like "the," "to" and "of" in English). Previous studies have analyzed more than 1,000 world languages for evidence of Zipf’s law, and the rule holds up in all of them. 

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These tropical hummingbirds make cricket-like sounds other birds can't hear

Date:  March 5, 2018

Source:  Cell Press

Summary:

Researchers have found that a tropical species of hummingbird called a black jacobin makes vocal sounds with an unusually high-frequency pitch that falls outside birds' normal hearing range. It's not yet clear whether the hummingbirds can even hear themselves, the researchers say.

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Budgerigars can identify spoken sounds without prior exposure to human speech

Like people, the birds 'trade' vocal cues to distinguish 'd' from 't' 

Date: May 31, 2017
Source: PLOS

No experience with human speech is necessary for budgerigars to perceive the difference between "d" and "t," according to a study published May 31, 2017 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Mary Flaherty from The State University of New York, Buffalo, USA, and colleagues.

The debate over speech perception is unresolved, with some evidence supporting a speech-specific mechanism and other evidence supporting a general auditory mechanism. The latter case holds that, in the absence of extensive experience with speech, there should be no difference between speech and nonspeech perception. To investigate this scenario, Flaherty and colleagues used budgerigars, vocal mimics that are similar to people in their ability to perceive consonant and vowel tokens. The researchers divided 25 budgerigars into groups before hatching, raising some in complete isolation from human speech and others with extensive exposure to human speech.

After the birds fledged, the researchers trained them to peck keys in response to synthetic speech sounds that began with "d" or "t." Then they tested the birds' perception of speech sounds that varied in two cues: voice onset time and the frequency of the first formant (formants are resonating frequencies of the vocal tract). For comparison, they likewise tested the perception of speech sounds in 25 people.

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Male Java sparrows may 'drum' to their songs

Date:

May 20, 2015

Source:

PLOS

Summary:

Male Java sparrows may coordinate their bill-clicking sounds with the notes of their song. Birds may communicate using both vocalizations and movement, as for instance occurs during courtship displays, but scientists' understanding of how they coordinate their movements with the sounds they produce is limited. To further investigate birds' communicative and musical abilities, the authors of this study looked into the vocalizations and bill sounds associated with singing in the Java sparrow, a song bird.

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