Babies, Birds Learn to Talk in Same Way

June 12 -- — Babies learn to speak the same way that some birds learn how to sing.

Infants don't learn to speak just by imitating the sounds of older humans in their midst, according to new research. Mom's gentle touch, or her loving smile, helps the baby learn that some sounds are more pleasing than others, thus moving it along the avenue of language development.

"The parents responses serve as cues to the infant that that was a successful sound," says psychologist Michael Goldstein of Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa. Goldstein began a research project while working on his doctorate at Indiana University that flies in the face of much conventional wisdom.

His findings, published in a recent issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, show that humans learn to speak through a variety of mechanisms, including both imitation and social interaction with others. Most experts have contended that we learn to talk purely by imitation, but Goldstein's work suggests it is far more complicated than that.

A Lesson From the Birds

So while he's barely out of graduate school, he's already on a course that establishes him as a high-profile target in the ongoing debates about the development of verbal skills. And he owes it all to cowbirds.

The brown-headed cowbird is one of the stranger critters in the avian world, in that the females lay their eggs in the nest of another species and let another bird hatch and nurture their young. Within about a month, the young cowbirds desert their foster home and join whatever flock of cowbirds they can find in the vicinity.

Goldstein began studying cowbirds because he was intrigued by one aspect of their maturing process. Only male cowbirds learn to sing. But they are taught to sing by females.

And here's the odd part.

"The females don't sing," says Meredith West, Goldstein's faculty adviser at Indiana University, a specialist in behavior development in animals and humans. "In fact, they can't sing."