Birds and humans share fundamental song and speech patterns, study finds
McGill University researchers have identified "universal" vocal patterns across hundreds of bird species and found that many of the same patterns also appear in human song and speech from cultures around the world. The patterns include small pitch intervals, regular and predictable rhythms, and phrase-final elongation, in which the last utterance in a phrase tends to be longer than the others.
Researchers from McGill University have discovered that birds and humans share fundamental vocal patterns in their songs and speech, according to a study published in the journal Science. The researchers analyzed thousands of recordings from over 350 bird species, comparing them to a global database of human voices and songs in 52 different languages.
The study found that many of the same vocal patterns were present in both bird song and human speech, including small pitch intervals, regular rhythms, and phrase-final elongation, where the final part of a phrase tends to be longer than the rest. These shared acoustic patterns could be a result of common vocal production mechanisms or biases, according to the study's lead author, Logan James.
The researchers found no strong evidence that vocal-learning birds, such as songbirds and hummingbirds, shared more similarities with human speech than nonvocal-learning birds. Both learned and innate vocalizing birds showed the same core vocal patterns. The study's senior author, Jon Sakata, suggested that this research could inspire scientists to investigate less-studied groups of birds that do not learn their vocalizations.
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