Grammar? That's something a little bird told us: Finches master rules of sentence construction
By Fiona Macrae
Mastering grammar has long been thought to be one of the factors which makes us human.
Yet a series of experiments with finches revealed that they too can master the rules of sentence construction.
The research, detailed in the journal Nature Neuroscience, mirrors earlier successful work on starlings.
It involved a team of Japanese scientists repeatedly playing the same bird call to Bengalese finches.
In some cases, the call was ‘grammatical’ – made up of segments or syllables ordered in the way they would be heard in the wild.
In others, the segments had been moved around, creating a grammatical mess.
Those used to ‘grammatical’ songs later called out only in response to songs which conformed to the rules – but those used to bad grammar responded to both types of call equally.
The Kyoto University researchers said: ‘These findings suggest that songbirds and humans have many similarities in their perception of auditory information and cast doubts on what is currently considered to be a unique characteristic of human language.’
