May 31
2007

Songbirds may be able to learn grammar

Posted by stevenl in Grammar

avatar

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?



Comments (1)add comment

rkelly said:

 
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".
May 31, 2007

Write comment
You must be logged in to a comment. Please register if you do not have an account yet.

busy

submission guidelines | membership drive | link to us | privacy policy | terms of use | syndicate  | donate | sitemap
created and maintained by
Ahadada Books