How birds learn songs likened to way humans learn speech: Learning how baby sparrows learn to sing their songs could provide clues to how humans learn to speak languages. The complete white-crowned sparrow song has five segments or snippets — researchers call them phrases — represented by the letters ABCDE. "A" is a characteristic opening whistle; "B" is a note complex or several musical notes in a specific sequence; "C" is a buzzing sound; "D" is a trilling sound; and "E" is another note complex. The study indicates, the sparrows' characteristic song is imprinted on their brains like a long-term memory and not as a complete song, but in pieces. [They] propose that circuits of certain nerve cells only need to detect pairs of song segments (AB, BC, CD, DE) for the birds to learn to sing. That is because each pair of segments overlaps the next, allowing the birds to figure out how to string together the complete melody. Rose said nerve circuits that detect pairs of song segments are shaped as the birds practice singing.

Sounds a little like the Markov-chain stuff. Kernighan and Pike's Practice of Programming had an example which generated random but sensible sounding text from some given text; it did pretty much the same thing -- detected pairs of adjacent words and picked a word that should follow the pair.

-K

posted by Kaushik at 10:50 PM Comment (1)