www.livescience.com/animalworld/060426_starling_linguist.html
Chomsky Challenge:
Bird Said to Grasp Key Aspect of Human Language
By Sara Goudarzi
LiveScience Staff Writer
26 April 2006
Noam Chomsky has endured many attempts to disprove his widely respected
theories of language, but never have any of them come from a 3-ounce bird.
The European starling, a tiny virtuoso, has the ability to learn and
recognize a feature of grammar that has long been thought to be unique to human
languages, researchers report in a new study.
Chomsky isn't buying it, however.
What humans can do
A common characteristic of human grammar is inserting words and clauses
within a sentence, without limit. 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," ad infinitum.
More simply stated, you can insert as many brackets as you want within a
sentence as long as there are as many brackets on the right as there are on the
left.
Chomskian linguists believe that this characteristic, known as recursive
center embedding, is a universal feature of human language, and the ability to
process it forms the core of human language ability.
"Our research is a refutation of the canonical position that what makes
human language unique is a singular ability to comprehend these kinds of
patterns," said the leader of the new study, Timothy Gentner of the University
of California at San Diego.
How the study was done
Gentner and colleagues generated 16 artificial starling songs, which
followed two different patterns. Similar to human grammar, the first set
allowed for a sound to be inserted in the middle of a song, a simple form of
recursive center embedding.
The next set of eight songs followed the finite state rule, whereby a
sound could only be added at the beginning or end, a type of structure
attributed to non-human communications.
After more than 10,000 trials, nine birds eventually learned how to
distinguish the patterns of the two songs.
To see if the birds could use the same rules to distinguish patterns of
longer pieces, the researchers then subjected the birds to longer strings of
song. And the birds were able to make the distinctions. This suggests that the
starling has to have memory and some recognition of pattern, explained study
team member Howard Nusbaum from the University of Chicago.
While the new findings, reported in the April 27 issue of the journal
Nature, might suggest that humans and some animals share basic levels of
pattern recognition, many levels of linguistic complexity may not be described
in this research.
Chomsky not convinced
"The article is based on an elementary mathematical error," said Chomsky,
professor of linguistics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "They are
overlooking the fact that there are many intermediate systems that are ignored
in mathematical linguistics because their properties are empirically
irrelevant."
Based on other work done 50 years ago by George Miller, Chomsky thinks
further research would show that the birds are not grasping linguistics in the
way the new study concludes.
"It has nothing remotely to do with language; probably just with
short-term memory," Chomsky told LiveScience.
The ability for the starlings to sort through the patterns may also just
be a benefit of natural selection, a process responsible for the origin of new
species and the adaptation of organisms to their environments, as proposed by
Charles Darwin.
"That aside, if someone could show that other animals had the basic
property of human language, it would be of very little interest to the biology
of language, but would be a puzzle for general biology," Chomsky said. "It's
expected that if a species has some ability that has real selectional
advantage, it will use it."
a.. Canaries Change Their Tune
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c.. Linguist Deciphers Uses of Word 'Dude'
d.. New Language Has Surprising Structure
e.. How Songbirds Change Tune
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