INFLUENCE OF AUDITORY-STIMULATION ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF SYNTACTIC ANDTEMPORAL FEATURES IN EUROPEAN STARLING SONG

We investigated how European Starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) were influen ced during song learning by acoustic patterns lacking certain syntacti cal and temporal features of the species-specific song. Hand-reared ma les were exposed to a sequence of heterospecific song patterns (song t ypes of Common Nightingales, Luscinia megarhynchos) which, in contrast to normal starling song, were not reiterated, were evenly separated b y breaks throughout the entire tutor sequence, and did not show an inc rease in maximum frequency from the beginning to the end of the sequen ce. The experimental males acquired none or only a few of the song pat terns from the training tape and developed songs with aspects of norma l syntax (sequential order of low- and high-frequency motif types) and temporal organization (more breaks between motifs at beginning than a t end of song). These features are missing in the songs of males reare d in complete acoustic isolation (Chaiken et al. 1993). Therefore, we conclude that European Starlings have a predetermined knowledge of som e syntactical and temporal song features, but need an acoustic input f rom the environment to convert such information into a corresponding v ocal output. The results show that acoustic patterns effective in stim ulating such a development do not need to contain specific features of starling song.