Nicole Geberzahn

University Paris Nanterre

Birdsong serves to attract mates and to deter territorial rivals. Even though song is not restricted to males, this dual function has almost exclusively been demonstrated for male song. To test the generality of hypotheses on birdsong, we investigated female song in the sex-role reversed, classically polyandrous African black coucal (Centropus gril...

Prominent research areas such as animal communication and sexual selection use birdsong as a model system. Most studies on these subjects are conducted on species with typical sex roles with male-biased song production. Accordingly, the functions of birdsong, mate attraction, and territorial defense have hardly been studied in females. We investiga...

In songbirds of the temperate zone, often only males sing and their songs serve to attract females and to deter territorial rivals. In many species, males vary certain aspects of their singing behavior when engaged in territorial interactions. Such variation may be an honest signal of the traits of the signaler, such as fighting strength, condition...

Background Vocal performance refers to the ability to produce vocal signals close to physical limits. Such motor skills can be used by conspecifics to assess a signaller¿s competitive potential. For example it is difficult for birds to produce repeated syllables both rapidly and with a broad frequency bandwidth. Deviation from an upper-bound regres...

The song of male birds is implicated in mate attraction and territory defence and assumed to evolve through sexual selection. Song production is hypothesized to represent a biomechanical challenge under physical, respiratory and neural limitation, leading to trade-offs. Although both sexes sing in numerous species, vocal performance has been little...

Birdsong is culturally transmitted, and geographical variations of song have been found in several songbird species. There is evidence that such dialects contribute to reproductive isolation through variation in female preference. In the wild, there is no report of consistent dialects in populations of zebra finches. However, under laboratory condi...

Noise pollution has been linked to learning and language deficits in children, but the causal mechanisms connecting noise to cognitive deficiencies remain unclear because experimental models are lacking. Here, we investigated the effects of noise on birdsong learning, the primary animal model for vocal learning and speech development in humans. We...

Vocal communication is essential for social interactions in many animal species. For this purpose an animal has to perceive vocal signals of conspecifics and is often also required to discriminate conspecifics. The capacity to discriminate conspecifics is particularly important in social species in which individuals interact repeatedly. In addition...

Many species are able to vocally recognise individual conspecifics and such a capacity seems widespread in oscine songbirds. The exact acoustic feature used for such recognition is often not clear. In the zebra finch (Taeniopygia guttata), the song motif is composed of few syllables repeated in a fixed sequential order and song bouts include severa...

The songs of migratory passerine birds have a key role in mate attraction and territory defence during the breeding season. Many species also sing on their wintering grounds, but the function of this behaviour remains unclear. One possible explanation, proposed by the song improvement hypothesis, is that the birds take advantage of this period to d...

Brain song control regions of adult passerine birds are sexually dimorphic in species such as the zebra finch (Taeniopygia guttata) in which males sing whereas females do not. In many tropical bird species, however, females sing as well. Here we study for the first time the ontogeny of the song control system and the song in a species in which both...

Birdsong is a model in a wide range of research areas. Because of a research bias toward species with male-only song production, sex-specific differences in vocal learning processes have been neglected. We conducted an experimentally controlled song-learning study in the laboratory using blue-capped cordon-bleus (Uraeginthus cyanocephalus), an estr...

Skylarks inhabit open fields and perform an aerial song display which serves as a territorial signal. The particularly long and elaborate structure of this song flight raises questions about the impact of physical and energetic constraints acting on a communication signal. Song produced during the three distinct phases of the flight - ascending, le...

When animals live in cities, they have to adjust their behaviour and life histories to novel environments. Noise pollution puts a severe constraint on vocal communication by interfering with the detection of acoustic signals. Recent studies show that city birds sing higher-frequency songs than their conspecifics in non-urban habitats. This has been...

Vocal interactions in songbirds can be used as a model system to investigate the interplay of intrinsic singing programmes (e.g. influences from vocal memories) and external variables (e.g. social factors). When characterizing vocal interactions between territorial rivals two aspects are important: (1) the timing of songs in relation to the conspec...

Birdsong is a popular model system in research areas such as vocal communication, neuroethology or neuroendocrinology of behaviour. As most research has been conducted on species with male-only song production, the hormone-dependency of male song is well established. However, female singing and its mechanisms are poorly understood. We characterised...

In mating systems with social monogamy and obligatory bi-parental care, such as found in many songbird species, male and female fitness depends on the combined parental investment. Hence, both sexes should gain from choosing mates in high rather than low condition. However, theory also predicts that an individual's phenotypic quality can constrain...

In this study we have investigated the effect of nest-building behaviour, courtship behaviour, and male–male interactions on male reproductive performance of the red bishop (Euplectes orix), a highly polygynous, colonially breeding weaverbird species. Previous studies on red bishops have revealed that male reproductive success is mainly determined...

Songbirds are well known for settling their disputes by vocal signals, and their singing plays a dominant role. Most studies on this issue have concentrated on bird species that develop and use small vocal repertoires. In this article we will go farther and focus on examples of how species with large song repertoires make use of their vocal compete...

In studies of birdsong learning, imitation-based assays of stimulus memorization do not take into account that tutored song types may have been stored, but were not retrieved from memory. Such a 'silent' reservoir of song material could be used later in the bird's life, e.g. during vocal interactions. We examined this possibility in hand-reared nig...

Song crystallization is a prominent developmental phase of oscine birds in which there is a transition from a production of plastic vocal material to a performance of elaborated song patterns that are typical for adult birds. Here we show that crystallization can be related to a marked change in memory properties involved in supplementary learning...

Songbirds with large vocal repertoires often show individually distinct profiles in the quantity of using their different song types. Factors involved in determining how often a song type is used have been identified in the social domain, e.g. the singing routines of territorial neighbours. In this study, I investigated the role of song development...

The production of learned vocalizations such as in birdsong is often used to judge whether stimuli had been memorized upon their presentation. However, failures in the imitation of certain song patterns may also reflect impaired development of motor programmes or impaired memory retrieval rather than failures in stimulus memorization during auditor...

The singing of adult birds shows a clear hierarchical organization and, due to its development through vocal imitation of sound patterns, makes an excellent biological model to examine the variables that influence the imitation of patterns on different hierarchy levels, e.g., songs and elements composing the songs. We studied such variables in the...

To see what effects learning in one context can exercise upon subsequent learning in other contexts the relation between olfactory learning performance of honey bees,Apis melliferaL., in a restrained classical conditioning paradigm for the proboscis extension reflex and chemosensory experience under natural circumstances was investigated. The effec...