Songbirds Have to Practice Also

A study on how finches learn to sing may lead to insights for human communication

FRIDAY, Sept. 6, 2002 (HealthDayNews) -- New research involving songbirds may help scientists discover how humans learn speech and language through patterns and sequences.

Songbirds -- the zebra finch in particular -- use a kind of "mental pointer" to learn and rehearse their songs, a long-term neural research project has discovered.

According to a report in this week's issue of Nature, a zebra finch has only one song, which lasts about a second. The bird starts trying to sing when it's a month old, mimicking a song that it memorized while listening to its father. It continues to practice singing thousands of times a day when it is awake -- and it rehearses while asleep, a different study has discovered.

After about two months' practice, the finch can repeat the song perfectly.

It does so, the study found, through the use of signals serving as "mental pointers." The signals are produced in the brain of the finch while it sings, and also while it dreams about, or "rehearses," its song during sleep.

Dr. Michale Fee, of the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Biological Computation Research Department, found that a finch uses individual neural signals lasting 6/1000 of a second to mark its place as it sings.

"I hate to use the 'follow the bouncing ball' example, but that's basically what it is," Fee says.

The finch's brain "circuits" are similar to the human ones handling motor control and learning, and it is hoped that further study will "help the scientific community take the next steps in figuring out the biology of learning," says Christopher Platt, a program director with the Bell Laboratories' neuroscience program.

The NSF has supported the songbird study at the Lucent Technology lab, where scientists are trying to learn how humans acquire language skills.

More information

For more on how humans learn speech, visit the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders.

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