The finding that starlings can grasp even these simple grammatical rules, Gentner said, suggests that humans and other animals share basic levels of pattern recognition and also hints at the likelihood of other cognitive abilities we have in common. "There might be no single property or processing capacity," Gentner and coauthors write, "that marks the many ways in which the complexity and detail of human language differs from non-human communication systems."
However, what they do appear to be unable to do is generate new instanciations. Which I would have thought would have been the very basic of 'real' language: generativity.
ScienceDaily: The Birds And The B's: Challenging Chomsky, Starlings Learn 'Human-only' Syntax Patterns:
Filed in: linguistics, pattern, animals, grammar, rules
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