Male zebra finches are sexually mature 100 days after birth, and have learned their courtship song by then, starting about 35 days after birth.

"There are critical periods in song learning," noted White, who joined UCLA's faculty in 2000 after earned her Ph.D. at Stanford in neuroscience, and then conducted postdoctoral research at Duke University.  "If we can learn what FoxP1 and FoxP2 are doing during these periods, then we may be able to highlight key developmental moments in children, to make sure the genes function properly at critical periods."

While White's team has not established the role FoxP2 plays in the male zebra finch's learning of the courtship song, they have found that it is in the right part of the brain (the striatum) to play a critical role in the learning of vocalization.

White and her team will continue research on FoxP1 and FoxP2, and the interaction between them, in the zebra finch and other birds.  She is interested in learning which genes are regulated by FoxP2, and which gene is required for vocal learning?

White's research is funded by the National Alliance for Autism Research, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, a MIND scholarship, and the Mental Retardation Research Center at UCLA.

White is interested in understanding social influences on learning, and on the neural changes that underlie learning.

"Songbirds are perfect for these questions because they learn their courtship and territorial songs through social interactions with other songbirds," she said.  "We want to understand the neural mechanisms that underlie vocal learning and see how social and environmental influences alter the learning, where that is happening in the brain, and what molecules are changing.  I'm very interested in human behavior, but humans are too complicated to study rigorously at the cellular and synaptic level.

"Language is uniquely human, but it has components, such as the ability to create new sounds; the zebra finch does that.  It creates new sounds like instrumental music, and may do that using the same genes as humans."

There are approximately 9,000 species of birds, approximately 4,000 of which are songbirds.  There are more similarities between the human brain and the songbird's brain than many people may realize, White said.  The term "bird-brain" may not be such a put-down after all.