Browsing by Author "Fukuzawa Y"

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    Sexual and temporal variation in New Zealand bellbird song repertoires
    (2021-10-01) Roper MM; Webb WH; Fukuzawa Y; Evans C; Harmer AMT; Brunton D
    How song repertoires vary within species and change over time is well studied in male songbirds. However, variation in female song repertoires remains largely unstudied despite female song being much more common and complex than once assumed. We investigated the song syllable repertoire of the New Zealand bellbird ( Anthornis melanura ), a species where both sexes have complex but sexually dimorphic song. We compared songs at individual and population levels to investigate sex and temporal variation of syllable repertoires. We detected 96 syllable types in the population over four years, of which 58% were unique to males, 32% unique to females and 9% were shared between the sexes. The population syllable repertoire of both sexes changed substantially across years with similar turnover rates (Jaccard’s similarity coefficients; female 52.9–69.0%; male 58.6–73.7%). Furthermore, many syllable types, unique to each sex, varied in prevalence within the population across years. The syllable repertoire sizes of individuals were higher for males than females (13-32, n = 7 and 6-16, n = 8, respectively). Although these sample sizes were low, the temporal variation in syllable prevalence and turnover for individuals were similar to patterns at the population level. Overall, male and female bellbirds exhibited similarities in temporal patterns of yearly repertoire composition, with rapid changes in syllable prevalence, but females had fewer syllable types than males. We suggest that these similarities and differences are consistent with male and female song repertoires being driven by similar but not identical selection pressures.
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    Sexually Distinct Song Cultures Across a Songbird Metapopulation
    (Frontiers Media S.A., 2021-11-17) Webb WH; Roper MM; Pawley MDM; Fukuzawa Y; Harmer AMT; Brunton DH; Hedrick AV
    Songbirds learn their songs culturally, through imitating tutors. The vocal culture of a songbird population changes as new song units (syllables) are introduced through immigration, copying errors, and innovation, while other syllables fall out of use. This leads to a diversification of the syllable pool across the species, much like the diversification and spatial patterns of human language. Vocal cultures have been well-studied in male songbirds but have been largely overlooked in females. Here we undertake one of the first comparisons of male and female song cultures across a songbird metapopulation—studying New Zealand bellbirds Anthornis melanura spanning a network of six islands. Having classified 20,700 syllables (702 types), we compare population syllable repertoire sizes and overlap between sites and sexes. We show that males and females—both with complex songs—have distinct song cultures, sharing only 6–26% of syllable types within each site. Furthermore, male and female syllable types can be statistically discriminated based on acoustic properties. Despite diverse syllable repertoires within sites, few syllable types were shared between sites (both sexes had highly distinct site-specific dialects). For the few types shared between sites, sharing decreased with distance only for males. Overall, there was no significant difference between sexes in degree of site–site repertoire overlap. These results suggest different cultural processes at play for the two sexes, underlining the inadequacy of male-centric song research and calling for comparisons of male and female song cultures in many more species.
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    The Koja Web Mapping Application for Context-sensitive Natural Language Spatial Querying
    (CEUR Team, 2023-01-01) Aflaki N; Stock K; Jones CB; Guesgen H; Fukuzawa Y; Morley J; Hu X; Hu Y; Resch B; Kersten J; Stock K
    The locations of objects are often described in natural language relative to some other object using vague and context-sensitive spatial relation terms (e.g. theatre near Trafalgar Square). Koja is a web map application that predicts the distance between a location and reference object based on the spatial relation term specified by the user and language and contextual features. That distance is used to retrieve objects of the specified type within a range of the distance. They are displayed through a map interface to make the process more intuitive and user-friendly.
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    What Do You Mean You're in Trafalgar Square? Comparing Distance Thresholds for Geospatial Prepositions
    (Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik, 2022-09-01) Aflaki N; Stock K; Jones CB; Guesgen H; Morley J; Fukuzawa Y; Ishikawa T; Fabrikant SI; Winter S
    Natural language location descriptions frequently describe object locations relative to other objects (the house near the river). Geospatial prepositions (e.g.near) are a key element of these descriptions, and the distances associated with proximity, adjacency and topological prepositions are thought to depend on the context of a specific scene. When referring to the context, we include consideration of properties of the relatum such as its feature type, size and associated image schema. In this paper, we extract spatial descriptions from the Google search engine for nine prepositions across three locations, compare their acceptance thresholds (the distances at which different prepositions are acceptable), and study variations in different contexts using cumulative graphs and scatter plots. Our results show that adjacency prepositions next to and adjacent to are used for a large range of distances, in contrast to beside; and that topological prepositions in, at and on can all be used to indicate proximity as well as containment and collocation. We also found that reference object image schema influences the selection of geospatial prepositions such as near and in.