For years, scientists have known that some songbirds exhibit patterns similar to those of humans, but the true reasons were unknown. In a new study published on October 29 in the journal Science, researchers found that patterns resembling human speech and singing appear widely in birds, even those that do not learn their voices from others.
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Logan James, a postdoctoral researcher in the biology department at McGill University in Canada and a co-author of the study, says that birdsong has often been compared to human speech and music because both consist of sequences of vocal units that need careful coordination, change according to context, and affect the listener.
The researchers compiled one of the largest databases used for this type of comparison, containing over 74,500 audio clips from approximately 5,900 songs by 367 bird species belonging to 52 families. The sample included two groups whose songs are learned through vocalization—songbirds and hummingbirds—and two groups whose songs are not learned in the same way.
The team then compared these recordings to a global database of human speech and singing containing more than 15,000 vocal units within more than 800 phrases from 52 human languages.
The study's co-author indicates that the team focused on four features: the first is the amount of pitch jump between one segment and another, the second is the regularity of the rhythm, the third is the change in the duration, pitch, and strength of the sound between the beginning, middle, and end of the phrase, and the fourth is whether these features rise and fall alternately or move in a more stable manner.
Logan explains: "In human speech and music, we usually tend to move between closely spaced pitches rather than large jumps, regular rhythmic patterns appear, and the sound sometimes lingers at the end of a phrase."
The team found that birds also followed many of these rules, as the jumps between frequencies were smaller than expected if the segments were arranged randomly, relatively even rhythms appeared more often than expected by chance, and segments near the end of the song were lengthened in a pattern similar to the lengthening of the end of sentences or phrases in humans.
These traits appeared across different groups of birds regardless of their ability to learn sounds, a finding that surprised researchers because it undermines the idea that sound learning alone creates these similarities.
Do birds talk like humans?
The authors refute this assumption, as the study focused on understanding how birds' vocalizations are structured in terms of time, pitch, and rhythm. When the researchers directly compared the patterns, they found clear similarities between humans and birds, but also differences. The intervals between pitches were shorter in human singing, while the lengthening of phrase endings was generally stronger in human speech and song compared to most birds.
The sounds of hummingbirds were also closer to human speech and singing than the sounds of some songbirds that have historically been considered the best model for studying human communication.
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