According this brief AP story, UCSD psychology professor Tim Gentner trained 9 of 11 songbirds to recognize a basic grammatical feature in so-called "bird sentences." The article suggests that Gentner's findings make the human language faculty just a bit less special. I suspect that linguists will dispute the significance of the findings. Here's an excerpt:
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.
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