Data_Sheet_1_The use of artificial songs to assess song recognition in imprinted female songbirds: a concept proposal.XLSX

We propose an experimental paradigm to examine acoustic features responsible for song preference and recognition in songbirds. Song preference in female songbirds is often influenced by early song experience. That is why several Estrildid species, including our subject species, the Java sparrow (Padda oryzivora), are known to show an imprinted preference for their father’s songs. After confirming that Java sparrow females preferred their father’s song compared to non-imprinted through song playbacks (first step), we repeated the playback tests in the same subjects using synthesized stimuli (second step). To create synthesized stimuli, we removed all the complex frequency modulations and subharmonics from song notes that we used for the first step playback tests to see the effect of spectrometric features on song recognition. The results indicated that females showed higher rate of calling towards synthesized father song stimuli, suggesting that the macroscopic patterns would play more important roles in song recognition than the microscopic acoustic features. Although we looked at spectrometric features and father-imprinted song preference in this study, similar testing can be applied in many ways to test preference for local dialects or subspecies-specific songs.

本研究提出一种实验范式，用以探究影响鸣禽鸣声偏好与鸣声识别的声学特征。雌性鸣禽的鸣声偏好通常受早期鸣声经历的调控。正因如此，包括本研究模式物种——禾雀（爪哇禾雀，Padda oryzivora）在内的数种梅花雀科（Estrildid）鸟类，均被证实会对其父代鸣声产生印记式偏好。在通过鸣声回放实验证实雌性禾雀相较于非印记鸣声更偏好其父代鸣声（第一步实验）后，我们使用合成刺激物对同一批受试个体重复了回放测试（第二步实验）。为制备合成刺激物，我们从第一步回放实验所用的鸣声音节中移除了所有复杂频率调制与次谐波成分，以探究频谱特征对鸣声识别的影响。实验结果显示，雌性禾雀对合成父代鸣声刺激的鸣叫频次更高，这表明宏观模式在鸣声识别中相较于微观声学特征发挥着更为关键的作用。尽管本研究仅围绕频谱特征与父代印记鸣声偏好展开，但该实验范式可通过多种变体，用于探究动物对本土方言或亚种特异性鸣声的偏好。