Editor's Summary
27 April 2006
The language of birdsong
Noam Chomsky's work on 'generative grammar' led to the concept of a set of rules that can generate a natural language with a hierarchical grammar, and the idea that this represents a uniquely human ability. In a series of experiments with European starlings, in which several types of 'warble' and 'rattle' took the place of words in a human language, the birds learnt to classify phrase structure grammars in a way that met the same criteria. Their performance can be said to be almost human on this yardstick. So if there are language processing capabilities that are uniquely human, they may be more context-free or at a higher level in the Chomsky hierarchy. Or perhaps there is no single property or processing capacity that differentiates human language from non-human communication systems.
News and Views: Language: Startling starlings
Recursion, once thought to be the unique province of human language, now seems to be within the ken of a common songbird — perhaps providing insight into the origins of language.
Gary F. Marcus
doi:10.1038/4401117a
Letter: Recursive syntactic pattern learning by songbirds
Timothy Q. Gentner, Kimberly M. Fenn, Daniel Margoliash and Howard C. Nusbaum
doi:10.1038/nature04675
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