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Quote:Starlings can recognise complex grammar in their songs in a way once thought to be exclusive to humans.

Although linguists have argued that certain patterns of language organisation are the province of humans, researchers have discovered the same capacity to detect such patterns in Sturnus vulgaris, the common European starling.

A team led by Prof Timothy Gentner, at the University of California, San Diego, with colleagues at the University of Chicago, showed that the bird was capable of recursion, or self-embedding.

This is the common characteristic of human grammars that allows for the creation of new statements by inserting words and clauses within sentences.

Quote:Led by Timothy Q. Gentner, assistant professor of psychology at the University of California, San Diego, a study published in the April 27 issue of Nature demonstrates that starlings have the capacity to classify acoustic sequences defined by recursive, center-embedded grammars...

Chomskian linguists have held that this recursive center-embedding is a universal feature of human language and, moreover, that the ability to process it forms the computational core of a uniquely human language facility.

"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," Gentner said. "If birds can learn these patterning rules, then their use does not explain the uniqueness of human language."..