Human vocal development and speech learning require acoustic feedback, and humans who are born deaf do not acquire a normal adult speech capacity. Most other mammals display a largely innate vocal repertoire. Like humans, bats are thought to be one of the few taxa capable of vocal learning as they can acquire new vocalizations by modifying vocalizations according to auditory experiences. We investigated the effect of acoustic deafening on the vocal development of the pale spear-nosed bat. Three juvenile pale spear-nosed bats were deafened, and their vocal development was studied in comparison with an age-matched, hearing control group. The results show that during development the deafened bats increased their vocal activity, and their vocalizations were substantially altered, being much shorter, higher in pitch, and more aperiodic than the vocalizations of the control animals. The pale spear-nosed bat relies on auditory feedback for vocal development and, in the absence of auditory input, species-atypical vocalizations are acquired. This work serves as a basis for further research using the pale spear-nosed bat as a mammalian model for vocal learning, and contributes to comparative studies on hearing impairment across species.

This article is part of the theme issue ‘Vocal learning in animals and humans’.

人类的发声发展和语言学习需要声学反馈，而天生耳聋的人无法获得正常的成人语言能力。大多数其他哺乳动物表现出很大程度上与生俱来的声乐曲目。与人类一样，蝙蝠被认为是少数能够学习声音的分类群之一，因为它们可以通过根据听觉经验修改发声来获得新的发声。我们研究了声震耳对苍白矛鼻蝙蝠声音发育的影响。三只幼年的苍白矛鼻蝙蝠耳聋，并与年龄匹配的听力对照组进行了比较研究它们的声音发育。结果表明，在发育过程中，耳聋的蝙蝠增加了它们的发声活动，它们的发声发生了显着变化，变得更短，音调更高，并且比对照动物的发声更不周期性。苍白的矛鼻蝙蝠依靠听觉反馈来发展声音，并且在没有听觉输入的情况下，获得了物种非典型的发声。这项工作为使用淡矛鼻蝙蝠作为哺乳动物的声音学习模型进行进一步研究奠定了基础，并有助于跨物种听力障碍的比较研究。

这篇文章是主题问题“动物和人类的声乐学习”的一部分。