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Songbirds learn grammar

The findings may shake up the field of linguistics

WASHINGTON: S imple grammar, long thought to be one of the skills that separates man from beast, can be taught to a songbird, research suggests.

Starlings learned to differentiate between a regular bird "sentence" and one containing a clause or another sentence, according to a study in Nature. It took University of California at San Diego psychology researcher Tim Gentner a month and about 15,000 attempts, with food as reward, to get the birds to recognise basic grammar.

What they learned may shake up the field of linguistics. While many animals can roar, sing, grunt or otherwise make noise, linguists have contended that the key to distinguishing language skills goes back to our elementary school teachers and basic grammar. Sentences that contain an explanatory clause are something that humans can recognise, but not animals, researchers figured.

Two years ago, a team tried to get tamarin monkeys to recognise such phrasing, but failed. The results were seen as upholding linguist Noam Chomsky's theory that "recursive grammar" is uniquely human and key to the facility to acquire language.

But after training, nine out of Mr. Gentner's 11 songbirds picked out the bird song with inserted phrases, about 90 per cent of the time. Two continued to flunk grammar. "We were dumbfounded that they could do as well as they did," he said.

Training

Mr. Gentner trained the birds using three buttons hanging from the wall. When a bird pecked the button it would play different versions of bird songs that he generated, some with inserted clauses and some without. If the song followed a certain pattern, birds were supposed to hit the button again; if it followed a different pattern they were supposed to do nothing. If the birds recognised the correct pattern, they were rewarded.

To put the trained starlings' grammar skills in perspective, Mr. Gentner said they do not match up to either of his sons, ages 2 and 9 months. What the experiment shows is that language and animal cognition is a lot more complicated than scientists thought, and there is no "single magic bullet" that separates man from beast, said Prof. Jeffrey Elman of the UCSD.

Marc Hauser of Harvard University, who conducted the tamarin experiment, said the study was important and exciting, showing that "some of the cognitive sources that we deploy may be shared with other animals." But he said it still does not disprove a key paper he wrote in 2002 with Prof. Chomsky.

The starlings are grasping a basic grammar, but not the necessary semantics to have the language ability he and Prof. Chomsky wrote about. He said Mr. Gentner's study showed him he should have tried to train his monkeys instead of just letting them try to recognise recursive grammar instinctively. But starlings may be more apt vocalisers and have a better grasp of language than non-human primates. Monkeys may be trapped like Franz Kafka's Gregor Samsa, a man metamorphosed into a bug and unable to communicate with the world, he suggested. — AP

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