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Animal behaviour

Birdsong normalized by culture

Nature volume 459, pages 519–520 (2009)Cite this article

Both birdsong and human language are learned, requiring complex social input. New findings show, however, that bird populations 'seeded' with aberrant song input transform it to normal song in a few generations.

Around 650 BC, the Egyptian king Psammeticus reputedly had two children raised by a mute goatherd, isolated from all linguistic input, to determine what language they would speak spontaneously1. As legend has it, the children's first word was bekos, so the king judged the 'original language' to be Phrygian, in which bekos means bread (that bekos represented the bleat of a goat was apparently not considered). Today, such an experiment seems both unethical and naive, for we know from numerous examples that children deprived of linguistic input will not spontaneously speak any language. To acquire language, humans need rich linguistic input early in life2,3. In a study published on page 564 of this issue, Fehér and colleagues4 greatly improve on Psammeticus's experiment, using laboratory-raised songbirds.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. W. Tecumseh Fitch is in the Department of Neurobiology and Cognition, University of Vienna, Althanstrasse 14, 1090 Vienna, Austria. tecfitch@mac.com,

    W. Tecumseh Fitch

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  1. W. Tecumseh Fitch
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Fitch, W. Birdsong normalized by culture. Nature 459, 519–520 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/459519a

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