Animal acoustic communication often takes the form of complex sequences, made up of
multiple distinct acoustic units. Apart from the well‐known example of birdsong, other …

This chapter addresses the interplay of vocal performance, sensorimotor learning, and vocal
evolution in songbirds. Vocal performance is increasingly recognized as an influential factor …

Summary 1 Biomechanical trade‐offs have been proposed to constrain trajectories of
evolutionary diversification. In songbirds, however, one such trade‐off may facilitate …

Studies of trilled vocalizations provide a premiere illustration of how performance constraints
shape the evolution of mating displays. In trill production, vocal tract mechanics impose a …

Social communication often involves vocal learning, whereby young animals learn their
vocalizations early in life by imitating the sounds of adults. In animals that learn their …

Highlights•We manipulated the auditory environment of wild nestling swamp
sparrows.•Nestlings exposed to songs of their own subspecies did not discriminate song …

Highlights•We introduce a new method for quantifying vocal performance,'frequency
excursion'.•We apply this method to sample questions about vocal performance in three …

Learned traits, such as foraging strategies and communication signals, can change over
time via cultural evolution. Using historical recordings, we investigate the cultural evolution …

Highlights•We studied variability in response to local and foreign birdsong using meta-
analysis.•Oscine songbirds responded more aggressively to playback of local than foreign …

Some of nature's most complex behaviors, such as human speech and oscine bird song, are
acquired through imitative learning. Accurate imitative learning tends to preserve patterns of …