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Study

Social interaction, sensitive phases and the song template hypothesis in the white-crowned sparrow

Baptista, Luis F.; Petrinovich, Lewis

Animal Behaviour, 1984

Peer-reviewedcontrolled laboratory experimentlaboratory

What they did

Young white-crowned sparrows were tutored either by tape recordings or by live birds, including live birds of another species, at ages inside and well outside the sensitive period established by the tape-tutoring literature.

Studied in
Zonotrichia leucophrys, Melospiza melodia
Sample size
hand-raised sparrows tutored by live birds or tape

What they found

Birds tutored by live models learned songs at ages at which tape tutoring no longer worked, and some learned the song of the other species when the tutor was live — an outcome tape tutoring essentially never produced.

What it means

The authors' reading, and ours. Where they differ, that difference is the point.

How the authors put it

Social interaction with a live tutor extends the sensitive period and can override the species-specific learning predisposition.

How NatureHQ reads it

The correction that keeps the classic results honest. A sensitive period measured with a loudspeaker is a fact about loudspeakers as much as about birds, and once a real animal is in the room the window widens and the species filter weakens. It is the single most important caveat on every isolation and tutor-tape experiment in this file, and it points at something general: an impoverished stimulus makes a learner look more constrained than it is.

Limitations

  • What exactly a live tutor supplies — attention, contingent response, visual cues, simple salience — is not isolated by this design.
  • Effects vary between individuals and between species; live tutoring does not abolish the sensitive period, it moves it.
  • Cross-species learning under live tutoring is reported in a minority of birds, not as the typical outcome.

The experiment, explained

  • Replacing the loudspeaker with an actual bird

    Is the sensitive period for song learning a property of the bird, or a property of the impoverished way it has been tested?

What this study is used for on NatureHQ

One study can inform several subjects. Here is everywhere this one is cited.

Finding the paper

Published by: Elsevier journalsPublished in an Elsevier journal.

doi.org/10.1016/s0003-3472(84)80335-8

Checked against Crossref and OpenAlex on 2026-09-28, and they agree on the title, the authors and the year.

NatureHQ summarises research in its own words and does not reproduce published text. Reviewed 2026-09-02.