Recursive syntactic pattern learning by songbirds
Recursive syntactic pattern learning by songbirds
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DOI：
10.1038/nature04675
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发表时间：
2006-04-27
期刊：
影响因子：
64.8
通讯作者：
Nusbaum, HC
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Gentner, TQ;Fenn, KM;Nusbaum, HC
人类经常产生能够被同一语言社区的其他成员理解的新话语(1)。语言学理论通过使用描述可接受的话语结构的句法规则（或生成语法）来解释这种能力（2）。语言单元（例如，较短句子中的单词或短语）的递归、分层嵌入是构建新话语能力的一部分，它最低限度地需要“上下文无关”语法（2,3），该语法比被认为足以指定所有非人类通信信号的结构的“有限状态”语法更复杂。最近的假设提出了一个核心观点：句法递归的能力构成了独特的人类语言能力的计算核心(4,5)。在这里，我们展示了欧洲椋鸟 (Sturnus vulgaris) 能够准确识别由递归、自嵌入、上下文无关语法定义的声学模式。他们还能够对语法定义的新模式进行分类，并可靠地排除不符合语法的模式。因此，从递归的、中心嵌入的语法中对序列进行分类的能力并不是人类独有的。这一发现为生理学研究开辟了一系列新的复杂句法处理机制。
Humans regularly produce new utterances that are understood by other members of the same language community(1). Linguistic theories account for this ability through the use of syntactic rules (or generative grammars) that describe the acceptable structure of utterances(2). The recursive, hierarchical embedding of language units (for example, words or phrases within shorter sentences) that is part of the ability to construct new utterances minimally requires a 'context-free' grammar(2,3) that is more complex than the 'finite-state' grammars thought sufficient to specify the structure of all non-human communication signals. Recent hypotheses make the central claim that the capacity for syntactic recursion forms the computational core of a uniquely human language faculty(4,5). Here we show that European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) accurately recognize acoustic patterns defined by a recursive, self-embedding, context-free grammar. They are also able to classify new patterns defined by the grammar and reliably exclude agrammatical patterns. Thus, the capacity to classify sequences from recursive, centre-embedded grammars is not uniquely human. This finding opens a new range of complex syntactic processing mechanisms to physiological investigation.