Young Birds Babble Like Babies

May 1, 2008 -- The happy babbling that entertains parents as their babies try to mimic speech turns out to have a parallel in the animal world.

Baby birds babble away before mastering their adult song, researchers report in Friday's edition of the journal Science.

Michale S. Fee and colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology studied the brains of baby zebra finches as the little birds learned the unique song they would use as adults.

The baby birds practiced making sounds incessantly, the team reported.

"Birds start out by babbling, just as humans do," Fee said, while the adult bird produces a very precise pattern of sound.

Like babies moving their limbs or trying to walk, babbling emphasizes the importance of play activities in learning.

"The parallels between human and bird language are indeed striking," said psychology professor Bob McMurray of the University of Iowa, though there are also important differences between the structure of human language and bird song.

"This work illustrates that language learning may operate by very general principles ... that can be seen across species as different as finches and humans," added McMurray, who was not part of Fee's team.

"However, when these somewhat simple principles are translated into neural tissue the results can be surprisingly complex," he added.

Indeed, Fee discovered that one part of the finch brain produces song, while the babbling is controlled by a different part of the brain.