WEDNESDAY, Feb. 16, 2005 (HealthDay News) -- A good night's sleep may help young songbirds learn to sing.
That's a finding that may have implications for how sleep affects learning in human infants, according to a new study.
When young zebra finches first wake up in the morning, they're much worse singers than they were the previous day, U.S. researchers found. But as they practice through the day, their warblings improve to the point where they become better than they were at the end of the previous day.
The researchers used software to analyze the structure and patterns of the singing of 12 young male zebra finches over several months. These birds are active in the daytime and don't sing at night.
The study also found that those birds that are the very worst singers in the morning eventually become the best at belting out their avian arias.
The findings appear in the Feb. 17 issue of the journal Nature.
In a prepared statement, Partha Mitra, a study co-author and theoretical neuroscientist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, noted that vocal learning in songbirds shares similarities with speech development in human babies. Young birds go through a period of "screeching" before they're able to accurately imitate songs. This parallels with the babbling of babies before they learn words, he said.
"We have more work to do to explain this 'one step back, two steps forward' effect of sleep on brain circuits that govern vocal learning. But a useful analogy for now is the tempering of steel, in which to gain its ultimate structure and strength, it is first weakened," Mitra said.
He collaborated in the research with City College of New York behavioral neuroscientists.
More information
The U.S. National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders has more about speech and language development.
