Male Western Meadowlarks (Sturnella neglecta) respond more strongly to playback of undegraded songs than degraded songs when both are played at the same amplitude and from the same position in the territory. The difference in response is only found if the song played is of a type that is sung by the test bird. These results support the use of cues from sound degradation to estimate distance; they also support a mechanism of degradation assessment which requires familiarity with the stimulus. We discuss the role of acoustic and visual cues in distance estimation and the significance of our results for a proposed function of song matching.
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McGregor et al. (1984) studied this question.