Cross-species parallels in babbling: animals and algorithms.

A key feature of vocal ontogeny in a variety of taxa with extensive vocal repertoires is a developmental pattern in which vocal exploration is followed by a period of category formation that results in a mature species-specific repertoire. Vocal development preceding the adult repertoire is often called 'babbling', a term used to describe aspects of vocal development in species of vocal-learning birds, some marine mammals, some New World monkeys, some bats and humans. The paper summarizes the results of research on babbling in examples from five taxa and proposes a unifying definition facilitating their comparison.

Babbling in a vocal learning bat resembles human infant babbling.

Babbling is a production milestone in infant speech development. Evidence for babbling in nonhuman mammals is scarce, which has prevented cross-species comparisons. In this study, we investigated the conspicuous babbling behavior of , a bat capable of vocal production learning.

Social behaviour and vocalizations of the tent-roosting Honduran white bat.

Bats are highly gregarious animals, displaying a large spectrum of social systems with different organizational structures. One important factor shaping sociality is group stability. To maintain group cohesion and stability, bats often rely on vocal communication.

Do Bats Have the Necessary Prerequisites for Symbolic Communication?

Training animals such as apes, gray parrots, or dolphins that communicate arbitrary symbols with humans has revealed astonishing mental capacities that may have otherwise gone unnoticed. Albeit bats have not yet been trained to communicate symbols with humans, we are convinced that some species, especially captive Pteropodid bats ("flying foxes"), show the potential to master this cognitive task. Here, we briefly review what is known about bats' cognitive skills that constitute relevant prerequisites for symbolic communication with humans.