New research suggests grammar is for the birds

WASHINGTON -- Grade-school grammar students should put away their excuses. Scientists say even a bird brain can grasp one of grammar's early concepts.

Researchers trained starlings to differentiate between a regular birdsong ''sentence" and one that was embedded with a warbled clause, according to research in today's issue of the journal Nature.

This ''recursive grammar" is what linguists have long believed separated man from beast.

It took Tim Gentner, a researcher at the University of California at San Diego, one month and about 15,000 training attempts -- with food as a reward -- to get the birds to recognize this grammatical structure in their own bird language. What they learned may shake up the field of linguistics.

While many animals can roar, sing, grunt, or otherwise make noise, linguists have contended for years that the key to distinguishing language skills goes back to our elementary school teachers and basic grammar. Recursive grammar -- inserting an explanatory clause like this one into a sentence -- is something that humans can recognize, but not animals, researchers figured.

Two years ago, a top research team tried to get tamarin monkeys to recognize such phrasing, but they failed. It was seen as upholding the theory of famed linguist Noam Chomsky that recursive grammar is uniquely human and key to the facility to acquire language.

But after training, nine of Gentner's 11 songbirds picked out the birdsong with inserted warbling or rattling bird phrases about 90 percent of the time. Two continued to flunk grammar.

What the experiment shows is that language and animal cognition is a lot more complicated than scientists once thought, and that there is no ''single magic bullet" that separates man from beast, said Jeffrey Elman, a professor at UCSD, who was not part of the Gentner research team.