Experimental evidence for compositional syntax in bird calls (2016)

Reminds me of another story in the What The Robin Knows about a group of elephants charging across the savanna, in the direction of some small trees (that would just get bowled over by elephants), and a bird getting the elephants to change direction by doing what you describe.

I felt my brain lighten significantly.

I'm not surprised that animals can communicate "simple" signals like danger, fear, etc. But how would I love for them to be able to exchange finer and longer messages. That would be so fun to imagine we were deaf for thousands of years and also that would make lots of new things to experience. ps: cats and dogs

>when it was the result of a gradual evolution //

What's the evidence showing it was gradual? Big jumps may be unusual statistically [what set are you sampling? 'planets with apex predators that are bipedal mammalians' looks like too small of a sample to make statistical inferences??] but then so is genesis and it seems that happened.

I remember a study many years ago that found that bird songs get longer and more complex for captive birds than they do for wilds ones. It seemed to suggest that a dense population and more free time were very important to the evolution of complex language.

Well, there were plenty of other Homo that, if my understanding is correct, we "took care of" :)

big jumps in the domain are rare, but bifurcations can easily be the result of little jumps in the domain. The map of genome to organism is not "differentiable".

I'm not sure if it's as clear-cut as you say. It seems like complex sounds could be harder to differentiate and could take more energy to recognize. What specifically will kill you if you transmit less information?

When they're not avoiding cats that is.

I've recently rediscovered how intelligible birds can be. I can't claim to understand what they're talking about, but I suggest to anyone with some free time to go outside at a time when the birds are active and to spend minutes focusing on their different calls. You really will begin to recognize the sounds and link them to behavior or events.

I wonder how much tribes know and rely on this kind of signals in their lives; probably implicitely.

Nice!

I'm not a linguist, but this seems like a wrong analysis to me. It seems to me you're imposing a specific word order paradigm where it may not be applicable.

Perhaps these birds "parse" compositions in order of most recently received (e.g. as something like a LIFO), or by some other rule that is nevertheless (compositionally) significant.

This study's "conclusion" is grossly unwarranted. But I don't think your criticism works either; the study doesn't mention any temporal order to the actions. It only states that when hearing a recorded compound call containing the directions "look for predators" and "come closer" in that order, the birds considered as a group take both of those actions at the same level that they do when hearing either direction in isolation, whereas when hearing a synthesized compound call of the same directions in the other order, they take neither action (again, considered as a group -- the overall level of scanning-for-predators behavior doesn't rise compared to hearing background noise).

They conclude that because synthesized cry YX gets a different (null) response than natural cry XY, the compound cry must conform to a compositional syntax. This makes no sense. For one thing, the compound cry carries zero additional meaning beyond that of its components -- as if hearing "the man ate the tiger" were no different from hearing "EAT TIGER MAN". But more importantly, the point of compositional syntax is that components may appear anywhere[1] within the structure of the phrase -- we can use "tiger" as the object of one sentence and the subject of another, or inside a clause embedded in a complex sentence, because the syntax will tell us which is which. All these people have demonstrated is that either (1) there is an ordering constraint on delivering two messages at once; or (2) these birds can tell the difference between recorded calls and synthesized calls.

Compare the English auxiliary verb system, which is non-compositional with ordering constraints. A verb may be modified by any or all of the following: first, a modal ("can try"), second, perfective have ("has tried"), third, progressive be ("were trying"), fourth, passive be or get ("got fired"; "was eaten"). While there are several different options in the first slot, and two (plus absence) in the fourth, it is impossible to substitute a meaningful phrase in for any of these.

[1] Obviously not anywhere, but inside many different component phrases.

Yes. A parrot could tell him: "You won't believe what a Japanese great tit just told me..."

How are you so sure what a bird’s brain is capable of? And fwiw trees and plants do have chemical means of communication.

You, my friend, need to do a little more comparative neurology research and keep up to date with findings in brain science.

Corvids alone refute you.