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May 31
2007
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Songbirds may be able to learn grammarPosted by stevenl in Grammar |
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Check out this article I found online.
The simplest grammar, it says, can be taught to a common songbird. That's if you believe research some supposed expert has put forward.
The simplest grammar, long thought to be one of the skills that separate man from beast, can be taught to a common songbird, new research suggests.
Starlings learned to differentiate between a regular birdsong "sentence" and one containing a clause or another sentence of warbling, according to a study in Thursday's journal Nature. It took University of California at San Diego psychology researcher Tim Gentner a month and about 15,000 training attempts, with food as a reward, to get the birds to recognize the most basic of grammar in their own bird language.
So do these results disprove famed linguist Noam Chomsky's theorythat "recursive grammar" is uniquely human and key to the facility to acquire language?
Are these songbirds actually 'learning' grammar?
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rkelly
said:
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A few months ago I saw an episode of Scientific American Frontiers where Alan Alda talked to a language researcher that had a parrot that could actually do addition or subtraction. The other things the parrot could do were actually pretty fascinating. The episode also had quite a few different animals that researchers are teaching to communicate or that we're learning how to communicate with. You can watch it here?scroll down to "If only they could speak". |
