Birdsong has been the subject of broad research from a variety of sub‐disciplines and has
taught us much about the evolution, function, and mechanisms driving animal …

Highlights•Comparative evidence supports two explanations for the origin of vocal
learning.•In one, vocal learning is favored by sexual selection for complex vocalizations.•In …

Animal acoustic communication is one of the most fruitful research areas in behavioural and
evolutionary biology. Work in this area depends largely on quantifying the structure of …

Humans and songbirds learn to sing or speak by listening to acoustic models, forming
auditory templates, and then learning to produce vocalizations that match the templates …

The study of vocal production learning in birds is heavily biased towards oscine songbirds,
making the songbird model the reference for comparative studies. However, as vocal …

Research on avian vocalisations has traditionally focused on male song produced by oscine
passerines. However, accumulating evidence indicates that complex vocalisations can …

Assessing diversity of discretely varying behaviour is a classical ethological problem. In
particular, the challenge of calculating an individuals' or species' vocal repertoire size is …

The most language-like aspect of the song of songbirds is its development: as with human
speech, birdsong develops through vocal production learning, in which individuals modify …

Speech evolution seems to defy scientific explanation. Progress on this front has been
jammed in an entrenched orthodoxy about what great apes can and (mostly) cannot do …

One way in which secondary sexual traits can influence differential reproductive success is
by playing a key role in the outcome of direct physical contests for mates. Here we describe …