Context-dependent rhythmicity in chimpanzee displays.

Rhythm is an important component of human language and music production. Rhythms such as isochrony (intervals spaced equally in time) are also present in vocalizations of certain non-human species, including several birds and mammals. This study aimed to identify rhythmic patterns with music-based methods within the display behaviour of chimpanzees (), humans' closest living relatives.

Non-adjacent Dependency Learning in Humans and Other Animals.

Learning and processing natural language requires the ability to track syntactic relationships between words and phrases in a sentence, which are often separated by intervening material. These nonadjacent dependencies can be studied using artificial grammar learning paradigms and structured sequence processing tasks. These approaches have been used to demonstrate that human adults, infants and some nonhuman animals are able to detect and learn dependencies between nonadjacent elements within a sequence.

Temporal modulation in speech, music, and animal vocal communication: evidence of conserved function.

Speech is a distinctive feature of our species. It is the default channel for language and constitutes our primary mode of social communication. Determining the evolutionary origins of speech is a challenging prospect, in large part because it appears to be unique in the animal kingdom.

Selective auditory grouping by zebra finches: testing the iambic-trochaic law.

Humans have a strong tendency to spontaneously group visual or auditory stimuli together in larger patterns. One of these perceptual grouping biases is formulated as the iambic/trochaic law, where humans group successive tones alternating in pitch and intensity as trochees (high-low and loud-soft) and alternating in duration as iambs (short-long). The grouping of alternations in pitch and intensity into trochees is a human universal and is also present in one non-human animal species, rats.

Spontaneous generalization of abstract multimodal patterns in young domestic chicks.

From the early stages of life, learning the regularities associated with specific objects is crucial for making sense of experiences. Through filial imprinting, young precocial birds quickly learn the features of their social partners by mere exposure. It is not clear though to what extent chicks can extract abstract patterns of the visual and acoustic stimuli present in the imprinting object, and how they combine them.

Budgerigars and zebra finches differ in how they generalize in an artificial grammar learning experiment.

The ability to abstract a regularity that underlies strings of sounds is a core mechanism of the language faculty but might not be specific to language learning or even to humans. It is unclear whether and to what extent nonhuman animals possess the ability to abstract regularities defining the relation among arbitrary auditory items in a string and to generalize this abstraction to strings of acoustically novel items. In this study we tested these abilities in a songbird (zebra finch) and a parrot species (budgerigar).

Can Birds Perceive Rhythmic Patterns? A Review and Experiments on a Songbird and a Parrot Species.

While humans can easily entrain their behavior with the beat in music, this ability is rare among animals. Yet, comparative studies in non-human species are needed if we want to understand how and why this ability evolved. Entrainment requires two abilities: (1) recognizing the regularity in the auditory stimulus and (2) the ability to adjust the own motor output to the perceived pattern.

Pauses enhance chunk recognition in song element strings by zebra finches.

When learning a language, it is crucial to know which syllables of a continuous sound string belong together as words. Human infants achieve this by attending to pauses between words or to the co-occurrence of syllables. It is not only humans that can segment a continuous string.

Correlation between Objective SCORAD and Three-Item Severity Score used by physicians and Objective PO-SCORAD used by parents/patients in children with atopic dermatitis.

Background: A self-assessment rating scale (SAS) is a good tool to assess the fluctuating disease severity and quality of life (QoL) in children with atopic dermatitis (AD). The European Task Force on Atopic Dermatitis created an SAS based on the Scoring Atopic Dermatitis (SCORAD) index, called the Patient-Oriented SCORAD (PO-SCORAD).

Objective: The aim of our study was to measure the correlation between alternative systems such as the OBJECTIVE SCORAD, the Three-Item Severity (TIS) score and the OBJECTIVE PO-SCORAD.

Zebra finches are sensitive to prosodic features of human speech.

Variation in pitch, amplitude and rhythm adds crucial paralinguistic information to human speech. Such prosodic cues can reveal information about the meaning or emphasis of a sentence or the emotional state of the speaker. To examine the hypothesis that sensitivity to prosodic cues is language independent and not human specific, we tested prosody perception in a controlled experiment with zebra finches.