Fig. 3.

Song imitation in a social arena. (A) A circular arena of cages, where an adult zebra finch (tutor) is placed at the center surrounded by 10 cages with juvenile birds (pupils, P1-P10). (B) Sonograms of the tutor song (top) and sonograms of six of his pupils. Only one pupil (P2) imitated the tutor's song accurately. Three pupils (P3, P6 and P10) copied only a subset of their tutor's song syllables and modified others. Two pupils (P4 and P7) did not appear to imitate the song of their tutor, and instead improvised an atypical song composed of call-like syllables.