The sound of parakeets fills a room at the Animal Care Center at NMSU, where biology professor Dr. Timothy Wright and other colleagues have been studying them to determine why it’s harder for us humans to learn new languages as we get older. He co-authored a paper published in June called “Evidence for maintenance of Key Components of Vocal Learning in Ageing Budgerigars Despite Diminished Affiliative Social Interaction.” Dr. Wright explained that lengthy title and the study.
“I think a much more concise title would be ‘You Can Teach an Old Bird New Tricks, But Only If They Want to Learn’”, he said. “So our study was one in which we contrasted the ability of young adult budgerigars and old adult budgerigars to learn new vocalizations when put into a new social situation.”
And what are budgerigars?
“Budgerigars are small pet parakeets that are familiar to anyone who’s ever been to Petco or PetSmart. They come in may colors; they’re native to Australia. These guys are great, captive subjects for studying vocal learning, because they learn not just as juveniles, but also as adults. And that’s something that’s familiar to us humans, because we also do a lot of our learning--virtually everybody learns our first language early in life. Some people learn multiple languages early in life, and some people try to learn new languages later in life. But many people experience that fact that it becomes harder as we get older. Our ability to learn new words, and especially to learn new grammatical structures, seems to decline over time.”
The researchers formed captive flocks of four adult males, previously unfamiliar with each other in the same age class.
“So we had maintained separate populations of birds, old birds and young birds, so we could draw one individual from each of these populations to create these novel groups. And then over a three-week period, we observed their social interactions, so we would film them with a video camera and look at who was sitting next to whom and how close they were sitting over time. And then we would also record their vocalizations daily. We’d pull one bird at a time out of the group and record it in a little chamber next to the group, so we could get good recordings, isolated sounds from it. But it was still trying to interact vocally with the other birds.”
They then took those calls into an acoustic space, which Dr. Wright describes.
“So we then would take those calls and do a bunch or measurements on, say, the frequency and the duration, how long they are and what pitch they are. And we would use that to place a call into an acoustic space in which different types of calls—budgerigars will have multiple types of contact calls, even within an individual—different types of calls were spread out across that space. And then we’d watch how birds moved across that space, and particularly looked at how birds who started off from different groups with different repertoires converged onto similar repertoires.”
What was his take from that study?
“Our take was the older birds seem to be capable of new learning new calls; they were able to change and learn new calls,” he said. “They seemed, though, to be able to learn new calls than the younger birds. And that mapped on very nicely to the fact that we also observed that the social networks in these groups composed of old birds were much more sparse, meaning that they had fewer social interactions with other birds in their group. And so our take home is that yes, they are capable of learning; but these older birds aren’t as inclined to be social with each other, and aren’t as inclined to learn new vocalizations.”
So what can humans learn from the study? If we want to learn a new language, for example, is socialization with others who are fluent in the language we want to learn a solution?
“At sort of a behavioral level, I think you’re absolutely right: that people, if they want to learn a new language later in life, really have to put themselves out and try and socialize with other people who speak that language, that it’s really those social interactions that drive language. Much more than, say, working with an app or a tape recorder.”
Dr. Wright explained how the research will continue to address other areas.
“For our own research, we are interested in what might be going on inside of the brains of the budgerigars that enable them to maintain learning throughout life. And so we’re continuing our investigations, looking directly at the neurobiology, looking within vocal centers to figure out what genes might be active; and potentially, way down the road, there might be a useful take-home from that for trying to treat humans who are trying to learn a new language, like people who suffered a stroke, for example, or people who had cochlear implants put in and haven’t had verbal language before, but are now learning verbal language.”
