Baby songbirds learn to sing by imitation, just as human babies do. So researchers at Harvard and Utrecht University, in the Netherlands, have been studying the brains of zebra finches—red-beaked, white-breasted songbirds—for clues to how young birds and human infants learn vocalization on a neuronal level.

While a baby bird mimicking the chirps of his “tutor” may seem far removed from human learning, the researchers at the two universities found that the songs of the birds and human language are both processed in similar areas on the left sides of the two very different brains. The discovery was published last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.