This is a scientific American 60 second science. I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

The word duet usually refers to a song, but in a sense every human conversation is a duet, with unwritten rules about when participants take their turns to speak.

You can hear how awkward it sounds when the rules are broken, as with a slight delay between this ABC news host and the astronaut Rick Mistrochio.

So give us an idea of what you guys go through on a daily basis.

Okay, well we wake up fairly early, we get about an hour.

That long pause, pretty uncomfortable, especially if you're not talking to someone on the

space station.

We humans first get a feel for this back and forth rhythm when we're still babbling babies.

And it turns out, same goes for songbirds in learning their duets.

What you should hear is something like the whistle like, shh, shhh, shhhhhhh, and then something like,

and then, true.

But then you hear, like, it's, yeah, I'm not very good at doing this song,

but. But, but. not very good at doing this song but it seems that only one bird is singing that's

how good they are.

Carla Rivera Casares a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Miami.

She and her team recorded the formative songs of a bird called the Can Break Wren in their nests in the Costa Rican forest.

Here's the same baby bird singing just two weeks earlier.

Listen for it trampling on the lines of its parent in the second half of this duet.

Again, for reference, here's the improved improved version when the bird had learned to take turns.

Rivera Casares analyzed the progress of 13 juvenile birds and she was able to determine that the youngsters didn't just naturally mature into this ability to sing a duet.

They gradually picked up their duetting skills from the adults they practiced with, a trait they share with humans in learning their species conversational rhythms.

This study is in the journal Royal Society Open Science.

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