Songbirds recognize songs the way humans recognize vowels

ARS Technica | January 27, 2016

Humans are obviously pretty special when it comes to language. One of our cleverest tricks is the ability to process the sounds of spoken language at high speed--even more remarkable when you consider just how variable these sounds are. People have very different voices and very differently shaped throats and mouths, which all affect the sound waves that come out of them. And yet we have very little trouble communicating with speech. There are many ways to try to figure out how this wizardry evolved, but one particularly useful source of information is birds. Full Story