Overview
- The Yamashina Institute announced on Monday, June 15, that it awarded the 24th Yamashina Yoshimaro Prize to Kazuo Okanoya, a 66-year-old special-appointed professor at Teikyo University and professor emeritus at the University of Tokyo.
- Okanoya’s long-term studies showed that domesticated Bengalese finch song is constructed from diverse combinations of multiple notes, a more complex structure than that of its wild ancestor.
- He has also mapped neural circuits involved in avian vocal learning and communication, work researchers say provides important parallels for thinking about how human language systems evolved.
- The institute will hold a formal award ceremony on July 24 and a commemorative symposium in Tokyo on September 12 to present and discuss the research.
- The Yamashina Yoshimaro Prize, run by the Yamashina Institute and co-sponsored by Asahi Shimbun, honors notable contributions to bird research and conservation and raises the profile of comparative studies linking animal vocal learning to human language research.