Social influences on the whistled songs of starlings

Adret-Hausberger, Martine

doi:10.1007/bf00299300

Cited by 52 publications

(64 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…As mentioned above, class I whistles are rarely produced in captivity (Henry, 1998), so we could not include the bird's own songs or familiar exemplars. However, field experiments have shown that male starlings are able to recognize each of these whistle types, even when unfamiliar dialectal variants are broadcast (Adret-Hausberger, 1982;Hausberger et al, 2000).…”

Section: Acoustic Stimulationmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…Given that the class I songs have been shown to be involved in vocal exchanges in a variety of contexts (Adret-Hausberger, 1982;Eens et al, 1989), we choose to have a good representation of these whistles in our stimuli. The four class I themes were represented using two exemplars of each theme, recorded in the field from an unfamiliar bird.…”

Section: Acoustic Stimulationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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State‐dependent hemispheric specialization in the songbird brain

George¹,

Cousillas²,

Richard³

et al. 2005

J of Comparative Neurology

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Lateralization of brain functions is a widespread phenomenon in vertebrates. With the well-known lateralization in the processing of human speech and the parallels that exist between birdsong and language, songbirds are interesting for addressing such questions. In the present study, we investigated the central processing of communicative and artificial sounds in starlings, in an integrative part of the song system: the HVC. Neuronal responses to acoustic stimuli were systematically recorded in both hemispheres while the birds were awake, and then anesthetized, allowing quantitative comparisons of the responses obtained in each situation. The total proportion of responsive sites in the HVC of the left and right hemispheres of all birds revealed a significant predominance of the HVC of the right hemisphere when the birds were awake, whereas a high interindividual variability appeared when the birds were anesthetized. When neuronal responses as a whole were further examined, the responses to each type of stimulus appeared to be nonrandomly distributed over the different situations, and some specialization may appear. The results suggest a complex and state-dependent hemispheric specialization toward behaviorally relevant classes of stimuli. In awake birds, the HVC of the left hemisphere may be more involved in the processing of songs that are used in individual recognition at distance, whereas the HVC of the right hemisphere may deal with long and complex sequences of a song that is involved in short-distance communication, especially between males and females. With birds under anesthesia, this pattern is strongly modified.

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Section: Acoustic Stimulationmentioning

confidence: 97%

Section: Acoustic Stimulationmentioning

confidence: 99%

State‐dependent hemispheric specialization in the songbird brain

George¹,

Cousillas²,

Richard³

et al. 2005

J of Comparative Neurology

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“…More than half of the whistles (56.4%) were produced within 2 s. We thus considered that two whistles separated by 2 s or less belonged to a single vocal interaction (see also Adret-Hausberger, 1982;Miller et al, 2004). Eight hundred and thirty five whistles were recorded in total.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…They forage in flocks from 10 to several hundred birds, and gather in the evening at roosts where several hundred to several thousand birds can be present (Feare, 1984). In all these contexts, song is produced (Adret-Hausberger, 1982). The males spend every morning in their colony (all year round in sedentary populations, in Spring in migratory populations), they visit their nest and have vocal interactions with their colony neighbors, which are generally from 5 to 20 m away.…”

Section: Testing Turn Taking In An Animal Model: the Starlingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Turn-Taking in Human Communicative Interaction

Holler

Kendrick

Casillas

et al. 2016

Frontiers Research Topics

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The core use of language is in face-to-face conversation. This is characterized by rapid turn-taking. This turn-taking poses a number central puzzles for the psychology of language. Consider, for example, that in large corpora the gap between turns is on the order of 100 to 300 ms, but the latencies involved in language production require minimally between 600ms (for a single word) or 1500 ms (for as simple sentence). This implies that participants in conversation are predicting the ends of the incoming turn and preparing in advance. But how is this done? What aspects of this prediction are done when? What happens when the prediction is wrong? What stops participants coming in too early? If the system is running on prediction, why is there consistently a mode of 100 to 300 ms in response time? The timing puzzle raises further puzzles: it seems that comprehension must run parallel with the preparation for production, but it has been presumed that there are strict cognitive limitations on more than one central process running at a time. How is this bottleneck overcome? Far from being 'easy' as some psychologists have suggested, conversation may be one of the most demanding cognitive tasks in our everyday lives. Further questions naturally arise: how do children learn to master this demanding task, and what is the developmental trajectory in this domain? Research shows that aspects of turn-taking such as its timing are remarkably stable across languages and cultures, but the word order of languages varies enormously. How then does prediction of the incoming turn work when the verb (often the informational nugget in a clause) is at the end? Conversely, how can production work fast enough in languages that have the verb at the beginning, thereby requiring early planning of the whole clause? What happens when one changes modality, as in sign languages -- with the loss of channel constraints is turn-taking much freer? And what about face-to-face communication amongst hearing individuals -- do gestures, gaze, and other body behaviors facilitate turn-taking? One can also ask the phylogenetic question: how did such a system evolve? There seem to be parallels (analogies) in duetting bird species, and in a variety of monkey species, but there is little evidence of anything like this among the great apes. All this constitutes a neglected set of problems at the heart of the psychology of language and of the language sciences. This research topic welcomes contributions from right across the board, for example from psycholinguists, developmental psychologists, students of dialogue and conversation analysis, linguists interested in the use of language, phoneticians, corpus analysts and comparative ethologists or psychologists. We welcome contributions of all sorts, for example original research papers, opinion pieces, and reviews of work in subfields that may not be fully understood in other subfields

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“…European starlings discriminate between variation in geographical dialects and show stronger responses (i.e. vocalize more often and with a shorter latency) to a familiar song dialect (Adret-Hausberger, 1982), suggesting that local songs are a more salient acoustic signal. Further studies should examine how chickadees would respond if tested with local songs and if it would be easier for chickadees to distinguish local songs from songs originating from more distant locations.…”

Section: Acoustic Mechanismsmentioning

confidence: 99%