Lecture
The linguistic abilities of birds - a window on the evolution of speech and grammar
- Date
- Friday 22 February 2019
- Time
- Location
-
Van Wijkplaats
Van Wijkplaats 2
2311 BX Leiden - Room
- 0.02
Abstract
Language is a unique feature of modern humans. One window to address its evolutionary origin is by comparative research, examing whether certain features that make up the language faculty are present in other animal species. Songbirds have relatively complex, well structured, learned vocalizations and for that reason birdsong is seen as one of the closest animal analogues for language. I am interested in whether this superficial similarity extends to a similarity in cognitive skills of birds, in particular with respect to the processing of phonetic or syntactic features. In both areas there is debate on whether specific abilities are uniquely human, and evolved in consort with language, or whether they originate from more general cognitive abilities that might also be present in other animal species, either by common descent or by independent evolution. We use zebra finch and also budgerigars (a small parrot species) as a model species to examine such questions. I will discuss some of our studies, concentrating on two topics. The first one concerns the human ability to recognize words regardless of individual variation across speakers. The second topic is the presence and scope of ‘grammatical’ rule learning abilities in birds.