Psychology Department, University of Maryland, 4094 Campus Drive, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA.
Department of Animal Biology, University of Illinois, 505 South Goodwin Avenue, Champaign, Illinois 61801, USA.
J Acoust Soc Am. 2019 Jan;145(1):562. doi: 10.1121/1.5087692.
The melodic, rolling songs of canaries have entertained humans for centuries and have been studied for decades by researchers interested in vocal learning, but relatively little is known about how the birds listen to their songs. Here, it is investigated how discriminable the general acoustic features of conspecific songs are to canaries, and their discrimination abilities are compared with a small parrot species, the budgerigar. Past experiments have shown that female canaries are more sexually responsive to a particular song element-the "special" syllables-and consistent with those observations, it was found that special syllables are perceptually distinctive for canaries. It is also shown that canaries discriminate the subtle differences among syllables and phrases using spectral, envelope, and temporal fine structure cues. Yet, while canaries can hear these fine details of the acoustic structure of their song, the evidence overall suggests that they listen at a more global, phrase by phrase level, rather than an analytic, syllable by syllable level, except when attending to some features of special syllables. These results depict the species-specific shape of auditory perception in canaries and lay the groundwork for future studies examining how song perception changes seasonally and according to hormonal state.
几百年来，金丝雀婉转悠扬的歌声一直给人们带来愉悦，同时也引起了许多对声音学习感兴趣的研究人员长达数十年的研究，但人们对鸟类如何倾听自己歌声的了解相对较少。在这里，研究人员调查了金丝雀对同种鸟类歌声的一般声学特征的可辨别程度，并将其与一种小型鹦鹉——虎皮鹦鹉的辨别能力进行了比较。过去的实验表明，雌性金丝雀对特定的歌声元素——“特殊”音节——反应更强烈，与这些观察结果一致，研究发现特殊音节对金丝雀来说是可感知的。研究还表明，金丝雀可以通过频谱、包络和时间精细结构线索来辨别音节和短语之间的细微差异。然而，尽管金丝雀能够听到其歌声的声学结构的这些细微差别，但总体证据表明，它们的听觉是在更全局的短语层面上，而不是在分析层面上，即一个音节一个音节地进行分析，除非它们关注特殊音节的某些特征。这些结果描绘了金丝雀听觉感知的特定于物种的形状，并为未来研究如何根据季节和激素状态改变歌声感知奠定了基础。
