Yoko Yazaki-Sugiyama’s personal growth in science interweaves perfectly with lessons on how scientists use songbirds to study language development.
As she shared at the 2019 Meet-the-Experts session “Lessons for Songbirds and Scientists: Learning to Communicate More Effectively by Listening to Others,” her story began at Sophia University, in Tokyo, where she studied quail with Kiyoshi Acki.
Acki encouraged his students to pursue independent ideas and projects, advising his students “to work on what you can be interested in.” Taking this advice to heart, Yazaki-Sugiyama read studies of white-crowned sparrows in different locations that “spoke” different dialects. She became fascinated by the fact that when baby birds of the same species were collected from each location and raised together, they sang in the same way.
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