Birdsong neuroscience and the evolutionary substrates of learned vocalization

Oscine songbirds have served as a model for speech and its evolution since the discovery that birds in this clade learn to produce their songs by imitating conspecifics. We discuss the initial characterization of neural substrates for song learning and highlight several avenues of neuroscientific, phylogenetic, and genomic research that have advanced our understanding of how songbirds evolved to produce this behavior.