In other words, these animals are suggested to possess a sound-structure-meaning mapping similar to human language competence. Three recent studies claim to have found clear evidence that songbirds-the Japanese tit ( Parus minor) and the southern pied babbler ( Turdoides bicolor) -possess a humanlike ability to syntactically combine vocalizations to create more complex meanings. This is mainly due to some remarkable behavioral and neural parallels between the acquisition of spoken language (speech) in human infants and song learning in juvenile songbirds that are absent in our closest relatives, the great apes. Provenance: Not commissioned externally peer reviewedīirdsong has become a prominent animal model system for investigating the evolution and mechanisms of human speech and language.

The funder had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.Ĭompound of a chuck call and a recruitment call R, JJB & GJLB are part of the Consortium on Individual Development (CID). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.įunding: Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science and the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) NWO.NL (grant number 024.001.003). But so far, there is no convincing evidence of syntax-determined meaning in nonhuman animals.Ĭitation: Bolhuis JJ, Beckers GJL, Huybregts MAC, Berwick RC, Everaert MBH (2018) Meaningful syntactic structure in songbird vocalizations? PLoS Biol 16(6):Ĭopyright: © 2018 Bolhuis et al. There are indeed remarkable behavioral and neural parallels in auditory-vocal imitation learning between songbirds and human infants that are absent in our closest evolutionary relatives, the great apes. We argue that while recent experimental findings on songbird call sequences offer exciting novel insights into animal communication, despite claims to the contrary, they are quite unlike what we find in human language.

Meaning is associated with structure through the principle of compositionality, whereby the meaning of a complex expression is a function of the meaning of its constituent parts and the mode of composition. In human language, the meaning of expressions (semantics) is dependent on a mind-internal hierarchical structure (syntax). Recently, it has been claimed that songbirds are able to associate meaning with sound, comparable to the way that humans do. The faculty of language is thought to be uniquely human.

Songbird meaning