Cognitive constraints on vocal combinatoriality in a social bird.

ABSTRACT: A critical component of language is the ability to recombine sounds into larger structures. Although animals also reuse sound elements across call combinations to generate meaning, examples are generally limited to pairs of distinct elements, even when repertoires contain sufficient sounds to generate hundreds of combinations. This combinatoriality might be constrained by the perceptual-cognitive demands of disambiguating between complex sound sequences that share elements. We test this hypothesis by probing the capacity of chestnut-crowned babblers to process combinations of two versus three distinct acoustic elements. We found babblers responded quicker and for longer toward playbacks of recombined versus familiar bi-element sequences, but no evidence of differential responses toward pla

SUBMITTER: Watson SK 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10275715 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature