Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Language acquisition researchers have demonstrated that human infants tend to learn some sound classes before others.However, similar biases acting on classes of sounds have not yet been demonstrated in a birdsong model. Here, I detail thelearning strategies of four zebra finches at both the level of the song and the level of the syllable. Although some syllables,namely introductory notes and transient chirps, appear to emerge along regular timeframes, the learning strategy chosenby the bird also has a strong influence on each syllables ontogeny. Syllables imitated earlier in a songs development tendto be imitated more accurately than syllables derived later in the learning process.