Do finches speak Russian? Songbirds can discriminate infant-directed song and speech.

Although infant-directed speech and infant-directed song are two modes of communication that have very similar features, infants can discriminate between these two types of “musical speech”, showing a preference for song over speech (Tsang et al). This preference was maintained even when the stimuli were not in an infant’s native language (i.e. Russian stimuli for English-speaking babies; Tsang and Falk). We extended these results using a comparative approach to study whether the ability to discriminate between song and speech stimuli is possible in another species to which acoustic stimuli are extremely important: the songbird. We presented male and female zebra finches, Taeniopygia guttata , with the same Russian and English stimuli used in the infant studies, and used an operant paradigm to ask birds to discriminate simultaneously between song and speech in both languages. Birds could easily learn the discrimination of both Russian and English song and speech, and transferred the learning to new stimuli not heard during training. There were no differences between languages or between male and female birds. These results support the idea that infant-directed song and speech stimuli are discriminable regardless of native language as finches are unbiased listeners for these stimuli.