Bird communication is far more intricate than simple chirps and tweets. From cedar waxwings’ high-pitched calls to magpies’ ...

In our quest to find what makes humans unique, we often compare ourselves with our closest relatives: the great apes. But when it comes to understanding the quintessentially human capacity for ...

A symphony of synapses fires every time a songbird sings. For Erich Jarvis, a neurobiologist at Rockefeller University, the neural pathways he finds particularly interesting inside a bird’s brain are ...

Birdsong is more than just mimicry. Birds learn to sing through complex brain processes similar to human speech learning.

Over a decade ago, behavioral ecologist Diane Colombelli-Négrel was wiring superb fairy wrens’ nests to record the birds’ sounds when she noticed something odd. Mother fairy wrens sang while ...

In a study, Australian cockatoos figured out that a new food was OK to consume by observing one another, a vivid example of ...

Language learning becomes more challenging for people as we age. Children learn languages easily, but this facility begins to decline when we reach our twenties and beyond. Why? To better understand ...

Speech and language disorders affect millions of people in the United States. A new LSU Health Sciences Center bird study has identified two tiny molecules as potential regulators of a gene whose ...