Grace Smith Vidaurre

From Tweets to Speech: What Birds Can Teach Us about Human Code-Switching 

Assistant Professor, Department of Computational Mathematics, Science and Engineering; 
1855 Professor, Integrative Biology 
smithvid@msu.edu  

The Smith Vidaurre Lab, or the Behavior IntegRated with Data Science (BIRDS) Lab, focuses on the functions of socially learned vocalizations and the early-life sensitivity of vocal learning. The social learning of vocalizations, or vocal learning, is a building block of human language— but several mammalian and avian taxa are capable of this form of learning as well.  

Smith Vidaurre’s lab works with two highly social avian species—zebra finches, and a parrot species called monk parakeets—that produce a rich diversity of vocalizations. 

“Monk parakeets are one of the only parrot species in the world that build their own nests, and they can live in nesting sites with dozens or hundreds of birds at a time,” Smith Vidaurre explained. “Zebra finches are also colonial nesters, and they have been used as a model to understand the neurogenetics of the social learning of vocalizations for several decades.” 

In this presentation, the audience will learn how changes in vocalizations can be used to communicate different types of information about identity. It will include examples of human code-switching, and examples of how birds may engage in vocal code-switching too. However, the researchers still do not understand why and how this trait evolved amongst distantly related vertebrate taxa. 

“This research can help us make new discoveries about how and why vocal code-switching may have first evolved,” Smith Vidaurre said.  

The next steps will be to use computational approaches to test longstanding hypotheses about how complex social environments could have driven the evolution of vocal learning, and to perform empirical research to learn more about the information that animals encode in their learned vocalizations in real-time social interactions.