Recursive syntactic pattern learning by songbirds

Timothy Q. Gentner (), Kimberly M. Fenn, Daniel Margoliash and Howard C. Nusbaum
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Timothy Q. Gentner: Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy
Kimberly M. Fenn: University of Chicago
Daniel Margoliash: Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy
Howard C. Nusbaum: University of Chicago

Nature, 2006, vol. 440, issue 7088, 1204-1207

Abstract: 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.

Date: 2006
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DOI: 10.1038/nature04675

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