16.04.2024 - Carel ten Cate

Abstract: In 1871 Charles Darwin wrote that 'the sounds uttered by birds offer in several respects the nearest analogy to language.. ‘. Doing so, he was referring to the songs of songbirds. Many songbird songs consist of a large variety of different notes, organized according to specific rules – a ‘syntax’. In addition songbirds acquire their songs by vocal learning – a rare trait, not present in our primate relatives. These features have given rise to many studies on birds with the aim to get insight in various domains of language and language evolution. One approach is to study the vocal communication system of particular bird species in great detail, looking for similarities and differences with human language. Another approach is to select some cognitive abilities considered essential or unique for producing or understanding language and to design experiments testing whether similar cognitive abilities can be demonstrated in birds. The presence of such abilities in birds demonstrates that they can evolve separate from language and for other reasons. This indicates that they might also have been present in pre-linguistic human ancestors and provided evolutionary building blocks for language. In our studies we mostly use the second approach. In my presentation I will present some of our work in three different domains relevant to language: vocal learning, perception of speech sounds, and grammatical rule learning.