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  Vocal plasticity in harbour seal pups

Torres Borda, L., Jadoul, Y., Rasilo, H., Salazar Casals, A., & Ravignani, A. (2021). Vocal plasticity in harbour seal pups. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B: Biological Sciences, 376(1840): 20200456. doi:10.1098/rstb.2020.0456.

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TorresBorda_etal_2021_Vocal plasticity in harbour seal pups.pdf (Publisher version), 764KB
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© 2021 The Authors. Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited.
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Torres Borda, Laura1, 2, Author
Jadoul, Yannick1, 3, Author
Rasilo, Heikki3, Author
Salazar Casals, Anna3, Author
Ravignani, Andrea1, 2, Author           
Affiliations:
1Comparative Bioacoustics, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society, ou_3217299              
2Research Department, Sealcentre Pieterburen, Pieterburen, The Netherlands, ou_persistent22              
3Artificial Intelligence Lab, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium, ou_persistent22              

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 Abstract: Vocal plasticity can occur in response to environmental and biological factors, including conspecifics' vocalizations and noise. Pinnipeds are one of the few mammalian groups capable of vocal learning, and are therefore relevant to understanding the evolution of vocal plasticity in humans and other animals. Here, we investigate the vocal plasticity of harbour seals (Phoca vitulina), a species with vocal learning abilities observed in adulthood but not puppyhood. To evaluate early mammalian vocal development, we tested 1–3 weeks-old seal pups. We tailored noise playbacks to this species and age to induce seal pups to shift their fundamental frequency (f0), rather than adapt call amplitude or temporal characteristics. We exposed individual pups to low- and high-intensity bandpass-filtered noise, which spanned—and masked—their typical range of f0; simultaneously, we recorded pups' spontaneous calls. Unlike most mammals, pups modified their vocalizations by lowering their f0 in response to increased noise. This modulation was precise and adapted to the particular experimental manipulation of the noise condition. In addition, higher levels of noise induced less dispersion around the mean f0, suggesting that pups may have actively focused their phonatory efforts to target lower frequencies. Noise did not seem to affect call amplitude. However, one seal showed two characteristics of the Lombard effect known for human speech in noise: significant increase in call amplitude and flattening of spectral tilt. Our relatively low noise levels may have favoured f0 modulation while inhibiting amplitude adjustments. This lowering of f0 is unusual, as most animals commonly display no such f0 shift. Our data represent a relatively rare case in mammalian neonates, and have implications for the evolution of vocal plasticity and vocal learning across species, including humans.

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Language(s): eng - English
 Dates: 2021-06-282021-11-012021
 Publication Status: Issued
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 Rev. Type: Peer
 Identifiers: DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2020.0456
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Title: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B: Biological Sciences
  Other : Philosophical Transactions B
  Abbreviation : Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B
Source Genre: Journal
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Publ. Info: London : Royal Society
Pages: - Volume / Issue: 376 (1840) Sequence Number: 20200456 Start / End Page: - Identifier: ISSN: 0962-8436
CoNE: https://pure.mpg.de/cone/journals/resource/963017382021_1