Abstract
Most studies on the evolution of communication systems concentrate on the primate lineage, ignoring the concept of parallel lines of evolution. Although phylogenetically remote from humans, some birds—particularly Grey parrots—share many cognitive and communicative abilities with humans. On certain tasks, they demonstrate processing abilities comparable to 5-6 year-old humans; they learn very simple vocal syntactic patterns and referential elements of human communication, but only through social interaction and in a manner that proceeds in ways similar to those of humans. Given this knowledge of vocal learning in birds, of the effects of social interaction on such learning, and of birds’ complex cognitive abilities, we should not ignore the avian line if we wish to determine the evolutionary pressures that purportedly affected the evolution of complex communication systems—particularly vocal systems—and develop theories and models that can be tested.
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Notes
- 1.
Mirror neurons respond to observed actions as if the observer had executed the actions him/herself. Other neurons in the spinal cord act to inhibit the individual from executing the observed action spontaneously.
- 2.
So, for example, when the target was “none”, he would practice “nnnn. *one” (Pepperberg et al., 1991).
- 3.
He probably had heard “grape” from his human trainers, but not any of the other mapped utterances.
- 4.
Remember that Alex questioned trainers directly; such behavior in the juveniles is therefore not unexpected.
- 5.
Nonhuman primates have been trained and tested on their ability to segment human speech sounds (e.g., Newport, Hauser, Spaepen, G., Aslin, R.N., 2004), but not on sound-letter associations or on productive recombination of speech elements.
- 6.
- 7.
Note that Fogassi and Ferrari (2004) suggest how the MNS might have evolved from monkeys to humans and thus also argue for various forms of MNs relating to various forms of imitation. I did not have access to their material when I wrote the original version of what is in this chapter, in Fall, 2002, after attending a conference on mirror neuron studies.
- 8.
Note that these experiments are critical in the sense that they would confirm what has already been demonstrated. Even a single bellbird that has learned the vocalizations of another species provides fairly strong evidence that learning occurs in the species, but many researchers would want these experiments carried out because the notion of learning by a bird that is supposedly a suboscine and incapable of such behavior is almost heretical.
- 9.
Other features of the song have also changed over the years (Kroodsma, pers. comm., September 2005), but the change in frequency has been emphasized because it is the most obvious (Kroodsma, 2005).
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Pepperberg, I.M. (2007). Emergence of Linguistic Communication: Studies on Grey Parrots. In: Lyon, C., Nehaniv, C.L., Cangelosi, A. (eds) Emergence of Communication and Language. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-84628-779-4_19
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