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Showing 1–7 of 7 results
Advanced filters: Author: Ofer Tchernichovski Clear advanced filters

  • Studying how songbirds learn songs can shed light on the development of human speech. An analysis of 160 tutor-pupil zebra finch pairs suggests that frequency dependent balanced imitation prevents the extinction of rare song elements and the overabundance of common ones, promoting song diversity within groups and species recognition across groups.

    • Ofer Tchernichovski
    • Sophie Eisenberg-Edidin
    • Erich D. Jarvis
    ResearchOpen Access
    Nature Communications
    Volume: 12, P: 1-14

  • In songbirds, a class of neurons shows a striking similarity in activity when the bird sings and when it hears a similar song. This mirroring neuronal activity could contribute to imitation.

    • Ofer Tchernichovski
    • Josh Wallman
    News & Views
    Nature
    Volume: 451, P: 249-250

  • Although culture is often considered to be passed on through social learning, there are species-typical constraints to cultural diversity that could have genetic origins. By studying the establishment of socially learned birdsong in an island colony of naive zebra finches with a song much different from wild type, it is now revealed that over as few as 3–4 generations the tutored song approaches that of the wild type. Thus, species-typical song culture can develop de novo, giving insight into language change and evolution in humans.

    • Olga Fehér
    • Haibin Wang
    • Ofer Tchernichovski
    Research
    Nature
    Volume: 459, P: 564-568

  • The ability of birds to learn a song depends not on their genes alone, but also on whether their genetic make-up is well matched to that of their singing teacher. This discovery sheds light on how gene–environment interactions affect learning.

    • Ofer Tchernichovski
    • Dalton Conley
    News & Views
    Nature
    Volume: 575, P: 290-291

  • Efficiently imitating a complex motor sequence such as birdsong is a computationally intensive problem. Here the authors show that young zebra finches learn new songs using a non-optimal strategy that prioritizes efficient learning of syllable vocabulary over syllable sequence.

    • Dina Lipkind
    • Anja T. Zai
    • Richard H. R. Hahnloser
    ResearchOpen Access
    Nature Communications
    Volume: 8, P: 1-11

  • In two species of songbirds and in pre-lingual human infants, vocal transitions across syllables are acquired slowly, one by one, indicating that combinatorial ability is not the starting point of vocal development but a laboriously achieved end point.

    • Dina Lipkind
    • Gary F. Marcus
    • Ofer Tchernichovski
    Research
    Nature
    Volume: 498, P: 104-108