Study
Selective vocal learning in a sparrow
Marler, Peter; Peters, Susan
Science, 1977
Hand-raised swamp sparrows were tutored with artificially assembled songs built from swamp sparrow and song sparrow syllables arranged in both species’ temporal patterns, so that syllable identity and song structure could be varied independently.
- Studied in
- Melospiza georgiana, Melospiza melodia
- Sample size
- hand-raised swamp sparrows tutored with constructed songs
The young birds learned syllables of their own species and largely ignored the other species’ syllables, regardless of which temporal pattern the syllables were embedded in.
What it means
The authors' reading, and ours. Where they differ, that difference is the point.
How the authors put it
Song learning is guided by an innate perceptual predisposition that makes conspecific material selectively learnable.
How NatureHQ reads it
The result that stops vocal learning being mistaken for a blank slate. A young bird in a wood hears dozens of species and copies almost none of them, and this shows why: the filter is on the way in, and it is tuned to particular acoustic features rather than to the song as a whole. That is the same shape as the answer in human infants, who narrow their speech-sound discrimination towards their own language in the first year. It also sets a boundary on the dialect story — culture decides which local variant a bird ends up with, and biology has already decided which pool of variants is eligible.
- The predisposition is much stronger in some species than others, and mimics such as starlings and lyrebirds show that it can be almost absent.
- Constructed tutor songs played from a speaker are a weaker stimulus than a live bird; live tutoring can override species preferences in some species.
- Two closely related sparrows; the generality of the specific filtering features is unclear.
Building a tutor song out of two species’ syllables
When a young bird ignores the other species singing around it, is it filtering on the sounds themselves or on how they are arranged?
What this study is used for on NatureHQ
One study can inform several subjects. Here is everywhere this one is cited.
Published by: American Association for the Advancement of SciencePublished in Science or Science Advances (AAAS).
doi.org/10.1126/science.198.4316.519
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.