While contact calls are known to be affiliative, song type matching in song birds tends to have an aggressive connotation. The exchange of such shared calls between individuals can be aggressive or affiliative in nature.
A good example of this can be found in bird song dialects or in the development of group-specific contact calls. Most commonly, vocal learning leads to convergence in sound parameters between individuals. Vocal production learning enables animals to copy novel sounds in their environment or to develop their own distinctive calls, avoiding overlap with those heard before. This use of vocal copying is similar to its use in human language, where the maintenance of social bonds appears to be more important than the immediate defence of resources. We found no evidence for the use of copying in aggression or deception. All copies were clearly recognizable as such because copiers consistently modified some acoustic parameters of a signal when copying it. Copying occurred almost exclusively between close associates such as mother–calf pairs and male alliances during separation and was not followed by aggression. We studied the function of vocal copying in a mammal that shows vocal learning as well as complex cognitive and social behaviour, the bottlenose dolphin ( Tursiops truncatus). However, in other animals, addressing with learned signals is very much an affiliative signal. Most examples of addressing in non-humans come from bird song, where matching occurs in an aggressive context. Such copying can function in addressing or labelling selected conspecifics. While important in the development of vocal displays, vocal learning also allows signal copying in social interactions. Sexual selection and individual or group recognition have been identified as major forces in its evolution. Vocal learning is relatively common in birds but less so in mammals.
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