Most of what we know about song learning comes from the laboratory using the ‘tape tutor’ method

Beecher et al

Bird Song Learning Via Eavesdropping
Michael D. Beecher^1,2*, John M. Burt¹, Adrian L. O'Loghlen¹,

Christopher N. Templeton², S. Elizabeth Campbell¹

¹ Department of Psychology and ² Department of Biology, University of Washington,

Seattle, WA 98195, USA

* To whom correspondence should be addressed, [e-mail]

Abstract: Bird song learning is a major model system for the study of learning with many parallels to human language learning. In this experiment we examined a critical but poorly understood aspect of song learning, its social context. We compared how much young song sparrows learned from two kinds of adult “song tutors”: one with whom the subject interacted vocally, and one whom the subject only overheard singing with another young bird. We found that although subjects learned from both song models, they learned more than twice as many songs from the overheard tutor. These results provide the first evidence that young birds choose their songs by eavesdropping on interactions, and in some cases may learn more by eavesdropping than by direct interaction.

The use of elaborate vocalizations, or song, in intraspecific communication is common in a wide variety of animal groups (1). In the oscine passerines (songbirds), song has one additional, intriguing aspect: it is learned, with much of that learning occurring early in life. Song learning in songbirds has many parallels with human language learning and has become a leading model system for studying the neurobiology of learning (2-8). In the present paper we examine an additional and only recently-appreciated parallel between human language learning and bird song learning: the key role of social factors in vocal development. That social factors are important in songbird vocal development is now widely accepted (9-13), but how precisely they contribute to song learning is poorly understood (14).

In this study we examined the role of singing interactions in song learning, comparing how much a young bird learned from direct interactions it had with an adult singer (interactive tutor) with how much it learned from overhearing or “eavesdropping” (15) on similar interactions between another young bird and a different singing adult (overheard tutor) (16). Direct interaction is the predominant model for human language learning, usually conceptualized as the parent tutoring the infant (12). We have hypothesized a possible role for eavesdropping in vocal learning by extrapolation from recent field experiments indicating that eavesdropping plays a role in other contexts involving song (13). These studies have shown that adult songbirds eavesdrop on singing interactions of neighborhood males and subsequently make decisions about whom to challenge or whom to mate with on the basis of information they have extracted concerning status relationships of the singing males (17-20). Thus it is plausible that young males might use the same kind of information to make tutor- and song-selection decisions in the song-learning process.

Our previous field and semi-natural lab studies with song sparrows (Melospiza melodia) have suggested that interactive singing is a critical stimulus for song learning (21-23) but we could not tell whether the young bird learned primarily via direct interaction with the tutor or from eavesdropping on other singing interactions (between the adult tutors or between an adult tutor and other young birds). Thus we designed the present experiment to directly pit learning resulting from direct interaction of the subject with an adult bird against learning resulting from the subject overhearing or eavesdropping on a comparable interaction between another young bird and a different adult tutor.

We brought eight young song sparrows in from the field when they were 3-4 days old and hand-raised to them to independence. During the first two months of their lives, all the subjects received song tutoring from four adult males (Phase 1). Following a 5-month hiatus in which they heard no song, subjects were then exposed to two of the original tutors for an additional three months (Phase 2, Dec 21 – March 31). The design is based on previous observations, in the field and in the lab, that a song sparrow is more likely to retain for its adult repertoire a song it heard in its natal summer if it is exposed to it again the following spring (21, 23). It has been hypothesized that the primary social influences in song learning occur at this later stage (24). Thus we expected that birds would learn more from the two tutors present during both Phase 1 and 2 than from the two tutors present only in Phase 1. The experimental manipulation was that one of the two late tutors became a subject’s interactive tutor, while the other became the subject’s overheard tutor, i.e., was overheard interacting with another subject. Thus the key question was: at the end of Phase 2 when the subject’s song repertoire crystallized, would the subject have learned (retained) more songs from its interactive tutor or its overheard tutor?

In Phase 2, pairs of subjects were acoustically yoked so that subject 1 interacted with tutor BO on day 1 and overheard tutor PP interacting with subject 2 on day 2, while subject 2 overheard tutor BO interacting with subject 1 on day 1 and interacted with tutor PP on day 2 (see schematic in Fig. 1). All interactions, whether direct or overheard, occurred in large sound-isolated experimental chambers (see Supporting Materials). For half of the subjects there was a black, opaque cloth between subject and interactive tutor so that they could hear but not see one another. In the 4-day cycle, the subject received interactive tutoring from one tutor (either BO or PP) on one day, overheard the interaction between the yoked subject and the other tutor (PP or BO) on the second day, and was returned to its home chamber and heard nothing for two days (while other subjects cycled through the experiment). The overheard singing interactions were fed directly to a loudspeaker in the experimental chamber, the only modification being that the songs of the overheard subject but not those of the overheard tutor were reduced somewhat in amplitude. Thus to the “eavesdropping” subject, the overheard yoked subject would have sounded somewhat more distant than the overheard tutor. The subject, though isolated from the overheard pair, was free to sing in its chamber; its songs could not be heard in the other chamber.

We measured the final song repertoire of each subject from the last three days of its singing at the end of March; in this species, a bird’s song repertoire does not change after the bird is 10-11 months old (25). The average repertoire size for the subjects was 8.5 songs, comparable to typical repertoire sizes of song sparrows in the field (26). Because we had chosen four adult song tutors for this experiment that had no song types in common (no “shared” songs) we were able to unambiguously trace most of the subjects’ learned songs to one of the four song tutors. We were able to identify a predominant tutor for 89% of these songs, i.e., 3/4 or more of the song’s elements (notes, trills, buzzes, etc.) were shared with one tutor song type. The remainder of the songs were hybrids composed of elements from multiple tutors’ songs and/or contained unidentifiable elements and are considered “unidentified” in the analysis below. The subjects were exposed to approximately 40 song types from the four song tutors, hence the dependent variable is how many song types they learned or retained from each of the tutors, i.e., from the interactive tutor (either BO or PP), the overheard tutor (PP or BO) and the two Phase 1-only tutors (BG and IC).

We found that birds learned or retained more songs from the overheard tutor than from the interactive tutor: 51% from the overheard tutor vs. 19% from the interactive tutor (t = 3.12 , df = 6, P = 0.008, two-tailed test). The remaining 30% of their songs came from the two early-only tutors (Table 1, Fig. 2A). The overheard tutor was preferred to the interactive tutor regardless of whether the interactive tutor could be seen (41% from overheard vs. 25% from interactive) or could not be seen because of the opaque barrier (62% vs. 14%). Although tutor BO was more influential in general than tutor PP, our yoked-subject design separated the relative effectiveness of overheard and interactive tutors from the relative effectiveness of the particular tutors filling these roles: each tutor was more influential when it was in the role of overheard tutor than when it was directly interacting with a subject (Fig. 2B).

Because a subject overheard two birds singing, the subject could have learned from the overheard yoked subject as well as from the overheard tutor. A subject also could have preferentially learned songs shared by the overheard pair; in previous studies we have observed preferential learning of songs shared by two or more adults (21-23, 27). To test for these possibilities, we compared the number of songs a subject shared with its yoked subject (whom it overheard) with the number it shared with non-yoked subjects (whom it did not overhear). Note that the subject will share some songs with other subjects by chance alone, because each subject is drawing its 8 or so songs from the same limited pool of model songs: 40 songs from 4 tutors. Subjects shared only slightly more songs on average with yoked subjects than with non-yoked subjects: 3.00 vs. 2.21 songs (P = 0.57). The pattern was similar regardless of the origin of the song: 1.25 vs. 1.0 for songs learned from tutor BO, 1.0 vs. 0.58 for songs learned from tutor PP, and 0.75 vs. 0.62 for songs drawn from the two early-only tutors. Thus of the songs the subject shared with the overheard tutor, fewer than one-quarter of them were also shared with the yoked subject, and most of these were probably shared by chance, indicating that the primary tutor in the overheard interactions was in fact the adult tutor and not the yoked subject and, moreover, that the subject had no preference for songs the overheard tutor-student pair ultimately shared.

Our results may help resolve a major controversy in the field of bird song learning concerning the role of social factors (14). The controversy grew out of the conflicting results of two different experimental paradigms and associated implicit assumptions about the role of social factors. In the classic “tape tutor” paradigm – the method from which we have learned most of what we know about song learning – tape-recorded song is played to the young bird in its isolation chamber, thereby providing experimental control at the cost of social context (28). In the “live tutor” paradigm, a live bird is the song tutor, thereby sacrificing experimental control in an effort to gain greater ecological validity. When pitted against one another, live tutors have invariably been more effective than tape tutors. Moreover, the rules of song learning often appear to be different when tape recorders are replaced with live tutors (7, 9). For example, white-crowned sparrows (Zonotrichia leucophrys) have a very short sensitive period and learn only conspecific song in the tape tutor paradigm, but have a longer sensitive period and will even learn heterospecific song when the tutor is a live bird (29). Further, the implicit assumptions generated by the two paradigms are different as well, the tape tutor paradigm implying that song learning is essentially a process of overhearing or eavesdropping on singing adults, the live tutor paradigm implying that it is essentially a process of direct song tutoring of the young bird by an older bird. The latter assumption arises from the typical design of the live tutor experiment, in which a single adult male tutor is usually placed close to the young bird. The results of the present study confirm aspects of both of these seemingly contradictory assumptions: more song learning occurred by eavesdropping than by direct interaction when the two potential routes were pitted against one another, but nevertheless the learning that occurred via eavesdropping depended on its interactive context (30)(31). Thus social interaction is indeed critical for song learning, but it is the overheard interaction, not the one in which the bird directly participates, that is key.

What is it about the overheard interaction that makes it a more effective than direct interaction as a stimulus for song learning? The recent studies of eavesdropping on song in other contexts have suggested the eavesdropper detects and subsequently exploits social asymmetries. In our experiment, however, the young bird had the same lower-status relationship to its interactive tutor as the yoked subject had to its tutor, so why should the overheard tutor have been more worthy of copying than the bird’s own interactive tutor? We suggest instead that overheard interactions may be more effective than direct interactions because they are less threatening. That the direct tutoring environment may have been too intense for the young birds in our experiment is suggested by the slightly better interactive tutoring observed when there was a blind between tutor and young bird. The general problem with direct song tutoring is that in most songbirds replying with the same or similar song type – “song matching” – is a threat (7, 32, 33). Thus if the young bird in the early or “plastic” song stage sings a version of one of its interactive tutor’s song types and its tutor then replies with its version of the song type, this interaction may suppress rather than promote song learning. Moreover, in contrast to the human vocal learning situation, the songbird tutor may not be motivated to teach the young bird – in this sense “tutor” is a misnomer – because the two have conflicting interests, the student generally being a potential usurper of the territory and mate of its song tutor. We will test this and other possible hypotheses in future experiments (34)
In conclusion, our finding that young sparrows learned more songs from tutors they overheard singing to others than they did from tutors with whom they directly interacted suggests that young birds may normally form their song repertoire more by eavesdropping on older birds than by direct “tutoring” interactions with them. We have recently begun radio-tracking studies of young song sparrows in the field and hope to compare the relative importance of direct and indirect social interactions in song learning under natural circumstances. Finally, despite the basic differences between songbird and human vocal learning we have noted, our results suggests an interesting direction for research on human language learning. Most studies of language learning by infants have focused on infant-parent interactions (12), and as one language researcher recently noted, “there appears to be an implicit assumption that children learn language mainly (if not solely) from speech directed at them” (35). But perhaps infants may learn language in part by eavesdropping on verbal interactions between other (usually older) individuals. Such a process would be consistent with the finding that language comprehension in infants typically advances well ahead of language production. (36)
References and Notes

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9. C. K. Catchpole, P. J. B. Slater, Bird song: biological themes and variations (Cambridge University Press, New York, 1995), pp.

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16. By convention, we use the term “tutor” or “tutor song” to denote the source of (the model for) a particular song the young bird has learned, and thus it applies equally whether the tutor song was produced by a tape recorder, a computer or a particular bird. “Social eavesdropping” is defined as extracting information from a signaling interaction between other individuals, see Ref. 15.

17. K. Otter et al., Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B. Biol. Sci. 266, 1305 (1999).

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21. J. C. Nordby, S. E. Campbell, M. D. Beecher, Behav. Ecol. 10, 287 (1999).

22. J. C. Nordby, S. E. Campbell, J. M. Burt, M. D. Beecher, Anim. Behav. 59, 1187 (2000).

23. J. C. Nordby, S. E. Campbell, M. D. Beecher, Anim. Behav. 61, 835 (2001).

24. D. A. Nelson, P. Marler, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 91, 10498 (1994).

25. J. C. Nordby, S. E. Campbell, M. D. Beecher, Ethol. 108, 39 (2002).

26. S. Peters, W. A. Searcy, M. D. Beecher, S. Nowicki, Auk 117, 936 (2000).

27. M. D. Beecher, S. E. Campbell, P. K. Stoddard, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 91, 1450 (1994).

28. P. Marler, J. Comp. Physiol. Psychol. Monogr. 71, 1 (1970).

29. L. F. Baptista, L. Petrinovich, Anim. Behav. 32, 172 (1984).

30. It could be argued that social interaction per se was not critical to the effectiveness of the overheard tutor and that the overheard tutor might have been just as effective without the overheard yoked subject (or any other singing interactant). This argument would have to also assume that at the same time the interactive tutor was somewhat inhibitory. Then the greater effectiveness of the overheard tutor could be attributed purely to a late but non-inhibitory influence. We can rule out this interpretation for two reasons. First, all previous experiments that have compared a solo tape or computer tutor with a live interactive tutor have found the latter to be more effective. Second, we have carried out a parallel experiment involving the same 4 tutors but which eliminated the interactive component of the overheard tutor in Phase 2. The overheard tutor was then no more effective than the early-only tutors (Ref. 31).

31. J. M. Burt, A. L. O'Loghlen, C. N. Templeton, S. E. Campbell, M. D. Beecher, (unpublished).

32. J. M. Burt, S. E. Campbell, M. D. Beecher, Anim. Behav. 62, 1163 (2001).

33. M. D. Beecher, S. E. Campbell, Anim. Behav. 70, 1297 (2005).

34. Our most recent experiments are using a “virtual tutor” to better manipulate the key variables. The virtual tutor is a computer program which can present digitized songs to the subject in ways that simulate realistic singing interactions. The program can either simulate singing interaction between two birds which the subject eavesdrops on, or it can directly interact with the young bird, replying to the subject’s songs according to appropriate rules, e.g., it can attempt to match the young bird’s songs. The general approach is described in Ref. 13.

35. N. Akhtar, Dev. Sci. 8, 199 (2005).

36. Supported by a grant from National Science Foundation (M.D.B). We thank S. Holman for assistance and E. A. Brenowitz, D. A. Nelson, S. Nowicki and W. A. Searcy for helpful comments on the manuscript.

Table 1. Number of songs learned from each tutor

subject	Interactive tutor	Overheard tutor	Total songs	Interactive tutor (IT)	Overheard tutor (OT)	IT’s early partner	OT’s early partner	un-ID’d songs
CC	PP	BO	9	0	7	0	2	0
HR	PP	BO	7	0	5	0	1	1
RC*	PP	BO	9	2	3	2	2	0
OR*	PP	BO	8	2	2	0	3	1
CB	BO	PP	10	4	3	2	0	1
TR	BO	PP	6	0	3	2	0	1
AP*	BO	PP	10	3	2	1	1	3
VR*	BO	PP	9	1	6	2	0	0
Mean number songs learned			8.50	1.50	3.88	1.12	1.12	0.88
Mean proportion songs learned (identified songs only)				0.19	0.51	0.15	0.15

* Subject had an opaque barrier between itself and the interactive tutor (could hear but not see the interactive tutor).

Figure Legends
Figure 1. Schematic of yoked subject design. In Phase 2, a subject was exposed to one tutor live, the interactive tutor, on one day, and overheard another tutor-subject pair on a second day. For one half of the subjects, subject and interactive tutor were separated by a black cloth screen (not shown). On days 3 and 4 (not shown) the young bird was returned to its home cage in a closed chamber. Note that the diagram is not to scale and that the subject and interactive tutor were in their own separate cages within a larger sound-insulated chamber.
Figure 2. Proportion of songs learned from the tutors.(A) Proportion learned from all 4 tutors in their particular roles (interactive, overheard or early-only partner of late tutor). The pie diagram is appropriate because it reflects the fact that the bird’s repertoire size is finite (8-9 songs in song sparrows) and that the bird selects some songs at the cost of other songs. (B) Relative effectiveness of late tutors BO and PP when in the two roles of interactive tutor and overheard tutor.

A.

B.

Supporting Online Material

Methods

Subjects were 8 young male song sparrows brought in from the field when they were 3-4 days old and hand-raised them to independence at 30 days. Song-tutoring began on Day 15, occurred for 4 hr per day until Day 30, and thereafter occurred throughout the daylight hours. Phase 1 of the song tutoring occurred from roughly May 15 to July 15 (some slight differences among subjects do to their different ages). In Phase 1 subjects were taken to one of two rooms, each of which housed two adult song sparrows in separate cages, approximately 4 m apart. Subjects were exposed as a group. Tutors BO and BG were in one room, tutors PP and IC in the other room. The tutors were territorial about their cages and the two tutors in a room had frequent singing interactions. The subjects were rotated between the two rooms every fourth day. From the conclusion of Phase 1 on July 15 to the beginning of Phase 2 on Dec 21, each subject was kept in a separate sound-insulated chamber and thus during this period the young birds could not hear one another (they began singing subsong in August) nor any of the adult tutors.

Song-tutoring resumed in Phase 2 (Dec 21 – March 31), but with only two of the original four tutors. A subject was exposed to its interactive tutor on one day out of four. Its cage was moved into a larger chamber (1.1 x 0.85 x 0.65 m) with the tutor in a separate cage located 0.4 m away. For half of the subjects there was a black, opaque cloth between subject and tutor so that they could hear but not see one another. On a second day the subject was placed in a similar chamber by itself where it could hear over a loudspeaker the singing of its yoked subject and tutor. In the other two days of the 4-day cycle, returned to its home chamber and heard nothing.

The young birds were housed in canary cages (40 x 23 x 36 cm) equipped with wooden perches. A canary cage in turn was housed within a ventilated cooler-type chamber (70 x 38 x 40 cm). In Phase 1, the coolers were open and the birds were exposed to tutors that were in larger cages in an open room. They could not see the other subjects but they could hear the other young birds chirping (the young birds did not begin to sing subsong until the isolation phase between Phases 1 and 2. In Phase 2, they were in the closed cooler chambers (isolated) on two days and in the larger chamber with their interactive tutor (one day) or alone where they overheard the yoked subject-tutor pair (one day). All songs of tutors and subjects were recorded and stored on DVD and analyzed subsequently. The procedures for tracing each of the subject's songs to particular tutor song types are described in our previous publications, see Refs. 20-22.