The Royal Society has just published a report (abstract here) showing that zebra finches can learn to distinguish between vowel in monosyllable words — e.g., man vs men — even if the words are spoken by somebody the finch has not heard before. Many linguists have supposed that the phonetic categorization needed for such a generalized distinction is a species-specific trait in humans that developed as part of the evolution of language. If that assumption were correct, it would be one more detail for this blog to explain. Finches are songbirds and depend on vocalizations more than many animals, but this report certainly suggests that phonetic categorization is a normal part of perceptual powers and needs no special evolutionarylinguistic explanation.
Dear Babel, what do you mean "special evolutionary explanation"??
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BLOGGER: Well, that was poor phrasing on my part. Let's make it "special linguistic explanation."
Posted by: Roberto | February 24, 2010 at 04:54 PM
Thank you, a long time ago my friend Fernando Nottebhom,at Rockefeller pointed out to me, well and to rest of the world, about songbirds' remarkable-as in difficult to perceive- cognitive capacities, which sometimes seem to astound many. I thought you were surprised by the experiments' results and in passing waving to those that could invoke special evodevo circumstances for language.
Posted by: Roberto | February 25, 2010 at 01:35 PM
The fact that Zebra Finches can discriminate and categorize vowel sounds is not that surprising. Chinchillas can too. But how do they learn to do it? What is the methodology that the investigators used to train them to discriminate and categorize. I haven't seen the full article yet, but my bet is that it is some variant of operant conditioning. If so, then phonological development doesn't require any special linguistic explanation either.
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BLOGGER: Didn't I say that?
I feel confident that most sorting and categorizing of language ties directly to standard perceptual powers, but I would still like to see a test with apes.
Posted by: Raymond Weitzman | February 25, 2010 at 07:19 PM