Baby bats learn language from peers

Baby bats learn language from peers (同伴) in their social group, and will adopt the group’s dialect, or accent, instead of their mother’s, researcher said on Tuesday.The findings shed new light on crowd-learning of language, a skill thought to belong mainly to humans and just a few other mammals. It also shows that bats are different from songbirds, which tend to learn songs by copying one of their parents. “The ability to copy vocalizations (发音) from others is extremely important for speech learning in humans, but it’s believed to be rare among animals”, said lead author Yossi Yovel of Tel Aviv University.For the study, researchers captured 14 pregnant Egyptian fruit bats. They separated them into three different bat social groups, where they raised the young bats with their mothers. Each bat group was exposed to a different recording of bat vocalizations.“The baby bats all adopted the manner of vocalizing of the group they heard, not their mothers. The difference between the vocalizations of the mother bat and those of the group is comparable to the difference in a London accent and, say, a Scottish accent,” Yovel said.“The babies heard their mothers’ London dialect, but also heard the Scottish dialect produced by many dozens of Scottish bats. The babies eventually adopted a dialect that was more similar to the local Scottish dialect than to the London accent of their mothers.”Researchers hope to conduct future studies to examine how bats’ dialects change when they leave their social groups, and if it affects how they integrate with others.