Scientists taught baby sparrows to sing a complete bird song after exposing them only to overlapping segments of the song, in the process discovering how the birds store musical memories.The findings might provide clues to human language development, the researchers said."We’ve known for a long time that birds are able to -- in fact, require -- tutoring with a song in order to produce it,” said study author Gary Rose, a professor of biology at the University of Utah. Birds are tutored by parent birds or other birds, he said, or by scientists who record the species’ songs and play them back to the birds."Tutoring by a tape recorder works,” he said. “This has been known for years. The same is true for humans -- we have to hear our speech to be able to reproduce it.""Birds will copy what they are tutored with if that song is played early in life,” Rose added, referring to what scientists consider a sensitive period for learning. He and other researchers call this ability to remember a song an acquired memory or an “acquired template."But the nature of the acquired template had not been fully understood, Rose said. Scientists didn’t know if the birds were storing the full song in memory or just parts of it."So we wanted to test the idea that the birds are actually just storing information about the linkages between particular phrases in a song” rather than the entire song, Rose said.The study results appear in the Dec. 9 issue of Nature.
