Do They Have an Accent?

Damn, first the prairie dogs and now birds. What's next? Teenagers?



Chomsky Challenge: Bird Said to Grasp Key Aspect of Human Language

By Sara Goudarzi
LiveScience Staff Writer
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.

Language of Prairie Dogs Includes Words for Humans

By Tania Soussan
Associated Press
posted: 06 December 2004
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) _ Prairie dogs, those little pups popping in and out of holes on vacant lots and rural rangeland, are talking up a storm. They have different "words'' for tall human in yellow shirt, short human in green shirt, coyote, deer, red-tailed hawk and many other creatures.

They can even coin new terms for things they've never seen before, independently coming up with the same calls or words, according to Con Slobodchikoff, a Northern Arizona University biology professor and prairie dog linguist.

Prairie dogs of the Gunnison's species, which Slobodchikoff has studied, speak different dialects in Grants and Taos, N.M.; Flagstaff, Ariz.; and Monarch Pass, Colo., but they would likely understand one another, the professor says.

"So far, I think we are showing the most sophisticated communication system that anyone has shown in animals,'' Slobodchikoff said.