Subject: [Tweeters] smart starlings
Date: Apr 27 20:33:42 2006
From: Ian Paulsen - birdbooker at zipcon.net


HI:
FYI:
From World-Science.net


Birds grasp basic rule of grammar, study finds

April 26, 2006
Courtesy University of California, San Diego
and World Science staff

The European starlinglong known as a virtuoso songbird and expert mimicmay
also soon win a reputation as something of a grammatician, researchers
say: the
little bird can learn language patterns formerly thought to be unique to
humans.



The European Starling. (Courtesy Washington Dept. of Fish &
Wildlife)

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Researchers led by Timothy Q. Gentner, a psychologist at the University of
California, San Diego, have found that starlings can understand a key
feature
of grammar.


This feature, called recursive center-embedding, is what lets speakers
make new
sentences by inserting words and clauses within other sentences.


Thus, for example, Oedipus ruled Thebes can become Oedipus, who killed his
father, ruled Thebes or Oedipus, who killed his father, whom he met on the
road from Delphi, ruled Thebes. This can theoretically go on without
limit.


Some researchers, including followers of the highly influential U.S.
linguist
Noam Chomsky, have held that this is a universal feature of human
language,
unique to humans, and which forms the logical core of our language.


The new findings challenge that view, Gentner said. If birds can learn
these
patterning rules, then their use does not explain the uniqueness of human
language.


The finding also re-invigorates the search for the evolutionary roots of
language among animals, said Daniel Margoliash, a coauthor along with
Gentner
of a paper describing the findings. The study appears in the April 27
issue of
the research journal Nature.


The scientists created artificial starling songs that followed two
different
rules. One allowed a sound to be inserted in the middle of a series of
sounds,
the simplest form of recursive center-embedding. The other allowed for
sounds
to be added only at the beginning or end of a string.


The researchers used recordings of eight different warbles and eight
different rattles produced by the same male starling to build 16 songs.
Eight
of these followed the first patterning rule, and eight the second.


They then taught 11 adult birds to distinguish the two sets of songs. The
birds
received a food reward for pecking at a button when they heard songs from
the
first group, and for not pecking when they heard songs from the second
set.
Nine starlings eventually learned to distinguish the patterns, although it
took
months and a few tens of thousands of trials, the researchers reported.


When tested with different combinations of rattles and warbles that
followed
the same rules, the starlings performed well above chance levels, the
researchers said. That suggests the birds had learned the abstract
patterns and
not just memorized specific songs, they added.


The researchers also checked whether the birds responded to ungrammatical
strings, that violated the established rules. The starlings treated these
differently, they reported.


The experimenters then studied whether the birds could grasp a key feature
of
human grammars: Could they extrapolate these rules to distinguish among
longer
strings of sounds? Remarkably, Gentner said, they could.


The finding that starlings can grasp even simple grammatical rules,
Gentner
said, suggests humans and other animals share pattern recognition skills
and
possibly other cognitive abilities.


There might be no single property or processing capacity, the researchers
wrote, that marks the many ways in which the complexity and detail of
human
language differs from non-human communication systems.


More generally, Gentner said, The more closely we understand what nonhuman
animals are capable of, the richer our world becomes. Fifty years ago, it
was
taboo to even talk about animal cognition, he continued. Now, no one
doubts
that animals have complex and vibrant mental lives.


--

Ian Paulsen
Bainbridge Island, WA, USA
A.K.A.: "Birdbooker"
"Rallidae all the way!"