Remarkably, only a few animals communicate through a system of vocalizations with characteristics that resemble the complexities and capabilities of human speech.
The most characteristic vocalization is the "great call," usually a duet in which the female leads and the male joins in with less-complex notes, used as a territorial marker by both sexes.
Additionally, its characteristic vocalization allows for acoustic detection and tracking.
This stresses previous findings (Brunelli 2005; Ehret 2005; Thornton et al. 2005) that vocalization rates and acoustic characteristics of rodent sounds are subject to numerous genetic influences.
To quantify the territorial behavior of the birds upon STI, 4 behavioral endpoints were recorded: number of full songs (a characteristic territorial vocalization), number of flights, closest approach (meters; m) to the decoy, and time spent within 5-m of the decoy.
We identified 62 bird species that produced a total of 72 unique vocalizations, based on spectrogram characteristics.
Characteristics of vocalizations, including both spectral and temporal parameters, can vary with body size, age, rank, hormonal state or fatigue level [ 3– 13], all of which are measures of physical condition and can thus be assumed to also be correlates of RHP.
Birdsong, certain vocalizations of birds, characteristic of males during the breeding season, for the attraction of a mate and for territorial defense.
By 'lexical syntax' Cheney and Seyfarth mean a kind of semantic compositionality of characteristic vocalizations.
During vocalizations, HVC exhibits characteristic sparse firing, which suggests it is a key structure for motor encoding of learned song, and arguably analogous to pre-motor vocal areas in humans.
