Department of Neurobiology, Duke University School of Medicine, Durham, NC 27710, USA.
Curr Biol. 2022 Oct 24;32(20):R1090-R1094. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2022.07.006.
Have your ever felt as happy as a lark, feathered your nest or taken someone under your wing? As we watch birds, we cannot help but be struck by their uncannily familiar behaviors - singing, nest building, caring for their young - to name just a few. Songbirds - the oscine suborder of perching birds that constitute roughly half (∼4,000) of all known avian species - are noted for the songs that males and sometimes both sexes in this group sing to court mates and defend territory from rivals. Birdsongs contain several to many acoustically distinct syllables, typically organized into a stereotyped phrase, and span the same audio bandwidth that we exploit for speech and music, making them easy for us to hear and appreciate. Consequently, eavesdropping humans long ago detected the most striking parallel between songbirds and humans: juvenile songbirds learn to sing in a manner similar to a child learning to speak.
你是否曾感到像云雀一样快乐，筑巢或庇护他人？当我们观察鸟类时，我们不禁会被它们那些非常熟悉的行为所打动——唱歌、筑巢、照顾幼鸟——仅举几例。鸣禽——雀形目鸟类的一个亚目，约占所有已知鸟类物种的一半（约 4000 种）——以雄性鸟类（有时该亚目中的雌雄两性）为求偶和抵御竞争对手而发出的歌曲而闻名。鸟鸣包含几个到许多在声学上不同的音节，通常组织成一个刻板的短语，并跨越我们用于言语和音乐的相同音频带宽，这使得它们很容易被我们听到和欣赏。因此，偷听的人类很久以前就发现了鸣禽和人类之间最引人注目的相似之处：幼年鸣禽以类似于儿童学习说话的方式学习唱歌。
