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Our new @VernesLab paper on #bat vocal learning is featured today in @newscientist! @EllaLatt (first author) is interviewed. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2240435-bats-can-learn-to-copy-sounds-and-it-may-teach-us-about-human-speech/ @MPI_NL @maxplanckpress
The original paper can be found here on the @royalsociety Biology Letters website: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbl.2019.0928
In this work, @EllaLatt trained adult P. discolor bats to modify their social calls
As you can see in this picture, P.discolor #bats are quite social. They live in large groups and use a range of social calls to communicate with each other.
Previously, @EllaLatt explored the vocal repertoire in these bats in a social context, describing a rich repertoire and many different call types. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fevo.2019.00116/full
Ella also previously designed new behavioural paradigms for bats, based on work in birds, to show volitional control of social vocalisations and vocal usage learning in individual bats https://jeb.biologists.org/content/221/14/jeb180729 (published in @J_Exp_Biol)
Now in this new paper in @royalsociety Biol Letters, she built on these paradigms, training individual adult bats to modify their calls to match the properties of a playback they heard.
@EllaLatt showed that by playing back a social call with a lower pitch, over time, the bats would gradually reduce their pitch accordingly (with tasty banana as a reward!)
(Not our bats, but you get the idea of how much they like banana!) 
To summarise, we showed that these bats can learn to modify their calls according to an acoustic template. This is called vocal learning and this skill has been very rarely shown in mammals. @EllaLatt and I discuss this in our recent Current Opinion paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352154617301250?via%3Dihub
Vocal learning is something we humans need to learn how to speak, and while what we have shown in bats is a simple version of vocal learning, we think it can help us shed light on the biology of human speech and language. @MPI_NL @VernesLab @bat1kgenomes
All of this work is collected in the brilliant thesis of @EllaLatt
A thesis that @EllaLatt will defend on the 23rd April in a virtual defense at the @Radboud_Uni @mpi_nl https://www.mpi.nl/events/imprs-doctoral-defence-ella-z-lattenkamp
