Study: Songbirds can learn basic grammar

[Lord Zentei]

Study: Songbirds can learn basic grammar

Wednesday, April 26, 2006; Posted: 1:10 p.m. EDT (17:10 GMT)

WASHINGTON (AP) -- 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.

Yet what they learned may shake up the field of linguistics.

While many animals can roar, sing, grunt or otherwise make noise, linguists have contended for years 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 recognize, but not animals, researchers figured.

Two years ago, a top research team tried to get tamarin monkeys to recognize such phrasing, but they failed. The results were seen as upholding famed 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 Gentner's 11 songbirds picked out the bird song with inserted warbling or rattling bird phrases about 90 percent of the time. Two continued to flunk grammar.

"We were dumbfounded that they could do as well as they did," Gentner said. "It's clear that they can do it."

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

Gentner said he was so unprepared for the starlings' successful learning that he hadn't bothered to record the songs the starlings sang in response.

"They might have been singing them back," Gentner said.

To put the trained starlings' grammar skills in perspective, Gentner said they don't 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 once thought and that there is no "single magic bullet" that separates man from beast, said Jeffrey Elman, a professor of cognitive science at UCSD, who was not part of the Gentner research team.

Marc Hauser, director of Harvard University's Cognitive Evolution Laboratory, who conducted the tamarin monkey experiment, said Gentner's study was important and exciting, showing that "some of the cognitive sources that we deploy may be shared with other animals."

But Hauser said it still doesn't quite disprove a key paper he wrote in 2002 with Chomsky. The starlings are grasping a basic grammar, but not the necessary semantics to have the language ability that he and Chomsky wrote about.

Hauser said Gentner's study showed him he should have tried to train his monkeys instead of just letting them try to recognize recursive grammar instinctively.

But starlings may be more apt vocalizers and have a better grasp of language than non-human primates. Monkeys may be trapped like Franz Kafka's Gregor Samsa, a man metamorphosized into a bug and unable to communicate with the outside world, Hauser suggested.

[drachefly]

I'd like to see how they were able to tell the birds weren't just recognizing longer songs. If you insert a clause, it gets longer.

[Crown]

Quick smash and leave post;

My sister is a Neuro-psychologist (not the Freudin type) and she told me on a report/study she read up on; music - it turns out - it is like a language. They did some tests (I don't remember and I don't know), but it turns out that music does actually have its own grammar, and listeners can predict what comes next. Strangely the 'easiest' musical language is Jazz. Yes, that's right, Jazz. The one that's meant to be sponteneous.

Stick that in your pipe and smoke it.

[drachefly]

Makes sense. What happens spontaneously is not necessarily random -- it is rather that which you do most readily.

Classical music deviates from this by making a pattern and then reaching in and breaking it.

I don't know why Rock and Pop would be easier than Jazz.

I wonder how Minimalism stacks up.

[Surlethe]

Quick smash and leave post;

My sister is a Neuro-psychologist (not the Freudin type) and she told me on a report/study she read up on; music - it turns out - it is like a language. They did some tests (I don't remember and I don't know), but it turns out that music does actually have its own grammar, and listeners can predict what comes next. Strangely the 'easiest' musical language is Jazz. Yes, that's right, Jazz. The one that's meant to be sponteneous.

Stick that in your pipe and smoke it.

One of my close friends, who has studied the violin for some thirteen years, has told me he is able to predict where a song's going, even if he's never studied it, just by listening. I find that I can't myself consciously extrapolate the music's course, but if there's an unexpected change in the music, I find it either disturbing or hilarious.

[Drooling Iguana]

Songbirds: 1
AOLers: 0

[Broomstick]

Doesn't surprise me a bit.

I've had pet birds for about 15 years now. There is no doubt that they can communicate verbally. They don't do so in the same exact manner we do, but given that quite a number of birds can learn to recognize/use human-language words and phrases in context (saying "hello" when you enter the room they're in, learning the names of favorite foods, etc.) why should it be strange they have at least some rudimentary grasp of grammar?

The trick is proving it, of course. But given the natural vocal abilities of birds, like I said, why should this be a total surprise for anyone?

[Metatwaddle]

Quick smash and leave post;

My sister is a Neuro-psychologist (not the Freudin type) and she told me on a report/study she read up on; music - it turns out - it is like a language. They did some tests (I don't remember and I don't know), but it turns out that music does actually have its own grammar, and listeners can predict what comes next. Strangely the 'easiest' musical language is Jazz. Yes, that's right, Jazz. The one that's meant to be sponteneous.

Stick that in your pipe and smoke it.

Wow, really? I'm a classical musician and I always figured jazz was somehow harder to understand than classical given its ridiculous number of different chords.

I'm guessing that classical was found to be the hardest? I always found rock and pop to be the most predictable sorts of music.

One of my close friends, who has studied the violin for some thirteen years, has told me he is able to predict where a song's going, even if he's never studied it, just by listening. I find that I can't myself consciously extrapolate the music's course, but if there's an unexpected change in the music, I find it either disturbing or hilarious.

I find that it varies from composer to composer. For me Mozart is the easiest composer to predict, while Beethoven and Bach are harder. I expect I could get better at predicting Bach if I listened to his music a bit more and learned the quasi-mathematical tricks he employs. (FWIW, I've played the piano for twelve-ish years.)

[Sofia]

Quick smash and leave post;

My sister is a Neuro-psychologist (not the Freudin type) and she told me on a report/study she read up on; music - it turns out - it is like a language. They did some tests (I don't remember and I don't know), but it turns out that music does actually have its own grammar, and listeners can predict what comes next. Strangely the 'easiest' musical language is Jazz. Yes, that's right, Jazz. The one that's meant to be sponteneous.

Stick that in your pipe and smoke it.

That's so interesting! I knew someone who knew how to play jazz piano, and even though he was improvising, he said that once you learn a few easy chord progressions you can make anything sound "jazzy" with not too much effort.

I would have thought that Blues would have been the easiest to predict: was that even a category? I'm just thinking of the chord progression everyone knows.

[Hawkwings]

that's definitely true. I find that I sort of subconsciously predict what's going to happen next in a song. It just sorta feels like the music is headed that way, and when it gets there, it's no surprise.

And jazz chord progressions are pretty simple, it's just all the 7s, 9s, 11s, and 13s that get you messed up.

[Metatwaddle]

And jazz chord progressions are pretty simple, it's just all the 7s, 9s, 11s, and 13s that get you messed up.

Exactly. I can deal with 7s, because they come up regularly in classical music as well. Past that, I get a bit confused because I wonder what the hell these extraneous notes are doing in the chord in the first place.