One study finds that infant bats stutter, as do human babies

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Scientists at the Berlin Museum of Natural History listened to 20 bats (called puppies) and found that, like humans, they make noises before learning to talk to others.
The largest winged bats (Saccopteryx bilineata) were observed in their natural habitats in Panama and Costa Rica.

The researchers recorded audio and video of the pups daily, following them from birth to weaning, which for most bats is around three months. Its useful life is usually seven years.

They found that male and female puppies stammered daily for about seven weeks, with “stammering episodes” of “long multisyllabic vocal sequences” lasting up to 43 minutes at a time.

Human babies, according to the study authors, speak to control their tongue, lips and jaw and their vocal system.

Behavior rarely seen

But stuttering or vocal imitation, they added, “is rare in the animal kingdom” and has so far only been observed in songbirds, although only males participate in this behavior.

This is the first time it has been documented that another mammal uses vocal practice behavior, they said, with both male and female bats.

The researchers brought the recordings to Germany to study them.

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They found interesting parallels between the characteristics of bat babbling and human babbling.

“For example, puppy stuttering is characterized by syllable reduplication, similar to the characteristic repetition of syllables (such as‘ dadada ’) in children’s stuttering,” said Lara Burchardt, co-author of the study .

The researchers said they hoped the findings would lead to more research on speech development in the human and animal kingdoms and, ultimately, the evolutionary origin of human language.

Sophisticated communication

Ahana Aurora Fernández, the study’s lead researcher, told CNN that in addition to mimicking the sounds of adults, it was also observed that the pups learned the songs of the adult males.

“Bats are fascinating creatures, they are animals with highly complex social lives (and) many species live in stable perennial groups throughout their lives,” he said.

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“What most people probably don’t know is that many species (bats) have sophisticated social vocal communication.

“Everyone knows he uses echolocation to navigate and search, but what’s really interesting is how many vocalizations are used to mediate social interactions. And bats sing like songbirds,” he added.

“The song often happens at high frequencies, so we can’t hear it, but if we could we would realize that our nights are full of (the) bat songs,” he said.

The study was published Thursday in the journal Science.

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