Edinburgh Team Finds 300-Million-Year Gap Birdsongs Follow Human Language Patterns
Updated
Updated · The Scotsman · Aug 12
Edinburgh Team Finds 300-Million-Year Gap Birdsongs Follow Human Language Patterns
2 articles · Updated · The Scotsman · Aug 12
Summary
Bengalese finch songs contain statistically coherent note sequences—an avian equivalent of words—with the same Zipfian pattern seen in human language, researchers from Edinburgh, Jerusalem and Japan reported in Science Advances.
Methods modeled on how babies segment speech found those patterns already present in the birds’ earliest singing attempts, suggesting they emerge naturally during learning.
The team said the shared structure stems from culturally transmitted communication: young songbirds absorb surrounding sounds and organize them into recurring chunks, much as infants detect word boundaries.
The findings challenge the idea that key building blocks of language are uniquely human and extend earlier work by some of the same researchers that found similar statistical patterns in humpback whale songs.