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Wed 26 Apr, 2006 06:25 pm
Science?
Languages?
Environment?
Hard to pick a forum for this.
Heard an interview with one of the researchers on this project earlier this evening.
Quote:Humans aren't alone in being able to grasp early grammatical concepts, say biologists who found songbirds can as well.
European starlings were trained to tell the difference between a regular "sentence" of birdsong and one with a clause embedded in it.
The European starling. (Courtesy of Daniel Baleckaitis, University of California San Diego)
The findings by psychologist Timothy Gentner of the University of California at San Diego challenge a finding by linguist Noam Chomky.
Chomsky theorized humans are unique in the animal world in their ability to use recursive grammar - that is, inserting an explanatory clause such as this one - in sentences.
Gentner's team showed starlings could recognize a recursive type of grammar involving warbles and rattles instead of words.
Of the 11 songbirds tested, nine were able to pick out the inserted phrases about 90 per cent of the time, the team reports in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.
Starlings show grasp of grammar
Similar experiments on tamarin monkeys showed the primates could not recognize recursive grammar.
"An intriguing possibility is that the capacity to recognize recursion might be found only in species that can acquire new patterns of vocalization, for example, songbirds, humans and perhaps some cetaceans," psychologist Gary Marcus of the University of New York wrote in a journal commentary accompanying the study.
cbc link ... off to find Nature mag link
pssst dlowan - can you get tomorrow/today's Nature online yet?
I'm still getting last week's.
Tweet before twirp, except after warble...
Excellent! Hahaha, very interesting
This is starling news! It's quite a discovery!
Oh, sorry. I got this thread confused with the bird pun one.....
That is really fascinating!
I thought I'd heard everything when I read the bit about people seeing with their tongues....
Oh, if only my tongue could talk!
The CBC article has been updated, and now has a link to the Nature article.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v440/n7088/edsumm/e060427-15.html
This link is interesting [ includes audio samples of starling song ]
http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/soc/gentner_starling06.asp