Abstract
The faculty of language is thought to be uniquely human. Recently, it has been claimed that songbirds are able to associate meaning with sound, comparable to the way that humans do. In human language, the meaning of expressions (semantics) is dependent on a mind-internal hierarchical structure (syntax). Meaning is associated with structure through the principle of compositionality, whereby the meaning of a complex expression is a function of the meaning of its constituent parts and the mode of composition. We argue that while recent experimental findings on songbird call sequences offer exciting novel insights into animal communication, despite claims to the contrary, they are quite unlike what we find in human language. There are indeed remarkable behavioral and neural parallels in auditory-vocal imitation learning between songbirds and human infants that are absent in our closest evolutionary relatives, the great apes. But so far, there is no convincing evidence of syntax-determined meaning in nonhuman animals.
Highlights
In their two studies, Suzuki and colleagues [3,5] build on earlier work [7] describing the “chicka” call system of the Japanese tit
When the authors played an artificial compound stimulus “ABC-taa” to the Japanese tits, the birds responded to this novel compound in a similar way as they did to ABC-D
The distinction between compositional semantics of human language and the combinatorial enrichments of vocalizations of songbirds and the alarm calls of West African Campbell monkeys [11] is fundamental and, in an interesting way, comparable to the principled distinction in chemistry between compounds and mixtures
Summary
Three recent studies [3,4,5] claim to have found clear evidence that songbirds—the Japanese tit (Parus minor) and the southern pied babbler (Turdoides bicolor)—possess a humanlike ability to syntactically combine vocalizations to create more complex meanings In other words, these animals are suggested to possess a sound-structure-meaning mapping similar to human language competence. These animals are suggested to possess a sound-structure-meaning mapping similar to human language competence Such results are extremely interesting, illustrating how comparative biological research might shed light on what is uniquely human to language, as well as gaining insight on the evolution of speech and language [6].
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