Bats can learn to copy sounds and it may teach us about human speech

Bats can learn to mimic specific sounds, which puts them into an elite group of animals capable of this. Studying how bats can copy noises could help us learn more about humans' unique capacity for speech and language. The ability to imitate specific sounds – called vocal production learning – is rare in the animal kingdom. Humans are capable of it, as are some bird species, as well as seals, dolphins, whales and elephants. "It's relatively difficult," says Ella Lattenkamp at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.