The Linguistics of Birdsong - Review in Trends in Cognitive Sciences

In the current issue of Trends in Cognitive Sciences there is an interesting (and free!) review of the linguistics of birdsong and its similarities and differences to human language:

Unlike our primate cousins, many species of bird share with humans a capacity for vocal learning, a crucial factor in speech acquisition. There are striking behavioural, neural and genetic similarities between auditory-vocal learning in birds and human infants. Recently, the linguistic parallels between birdsong and spoken language have begun to be investigated. Although both birdsong and human language are hierarchically organized according to particular syntactic constraints, birdsong structure is best characterized as ‘phonological syntax’, resembling aspects of human sound structure. Crucially, birdsong lacks semantics and words. Formal language and linguistic analysis remains essential for the proper characterization of birdsong as a model system for human speech and language, and for the study of the brain and cognition evolution.

Robert C. Berwick, Kazuo Okanoya, Gabriel J.L. Beckers and Johan J. Bolhuis (2011) "Songs to syntax: the linguistics of birdsong." In: Trends in Cognitive Sciences." Volume 15, Issue 3, March 2011, Pages 113-121

Update: Edmund Blair Bolles of Babel's Dawn has also just published a very short article about human speech, birdsong and convergent evolution in the journal Bioscience (here)

Back to Blogging Soon

Today I handed in my last essay for this term and I really hope I'll be able to post more regularly now.

Meanhwile, both Neurophilosophy and Babel's Dawn have interesting posts up regarding work done by Ofer Tchernichovski, Olga Feher, and her colleagues regarding the tendency of birdsong to converge on the on the standard wildtype-model after a few generations when the first generation was isolate and had no model output they could adopt. (although I find it a bit misleading if birdsong is called language as is done over at the otherwise excellent blog Neurophilosopy)

This happened by small variations the birds made to their input over a couple of generations. These variations accumulated an in the end yielded the wild-type.

In the words of the authors:

"Thus, species-typical song culture can appear de novo. Our study has parallels with language change and evolution. In analogy to models in quantitative genetics, we model song culture as a multigenerational phenotype partly encoded genetically in an isolate founding population, influenced by environmental variables and taking multiple generations to emerge." (Feher et al. 2009).

The question now is inhowfar we can draw a parallel to how human language may be genetically encoded. The topic has been covered previously (here) and although there are also opposing views, (see, for example, Derek Bickerton here), it seems that a consensus is about to emerge that sees language acquisition as the interplay between social learning, innate biases, and more general cognitive capacities. (see, e.g. here and here)

Back Home

I’m finally back home and having access to the internet again. At least till September 21, that is, which is when I will start my 10 months abroad in Nottingham

I'm still working on some term papers, for example, I'm just wrapping up a 27-Page Paper on Friedrich Nietzsche's theory of the evolution and function of consciousness.

Apart from that, there were about 550 posts in my RSS newsreader, and I still haven't managed to have a look at all of them.

Some very interesting things happened in the blogosphere while I was away, and I hope I will find the time to compile a small list of my favorite posts.

But for now, here's something funnny:

Richard Dawkins calls the view that evolution had a direction and reached some sort of climax in homo sapiens a "conceit of hindsight." As Steven Pinker observes, if Elephants were the most culturally advanced species on the planet, they would probably search for the evolutionary path that inevitably cumulated in the evolutionary optimum of trunkitude. The same idea could be applied to all other fictional and nonfictional organisms,

such as sea otters (spolier alert),

zombies, or:

[Hat Tip: Evil Under the Sun, PTET, cthulhu.com]