Starlings linguists language loggers readers follow commented on the work of studied are damn smart!
As Mark just
reported,
it's difficult to know what conclusions we should draw from
recursive
starlings. The obvious conclusion is just that starlings are smart.
Yup, and we humans are pretty smart too. We can do all sorts of tricky
recursion.
Center embedding, mind you, that's a problem. It normally gets covered
in Linguistics 101 under the heading of performance versus competence,
or language processing, or psycholinguistics or some such, and the
basic point is that certain recursive structures apparently tax our processing abilities to the
extent that only a theoretical syntactician could label them anything
but ungrammatical.
In case you didn't quite figure out how the the quadruple center
embedding at the top of this entry could possibly mean anything at all,
here is how it's built up:
Starlings are damn smart!
Starlings linguists studied are
damn smart!
Starlings linguists language
loggers commented on the work of studied are damn
smart!
Starlings linguists language
loggers readers follow commented on the
work of studied are damn smart!
If your brain is anything like mine, you probably find the third
sentence in the sequence gently gliding over a cliff of realtime
incomprehensibility, despite it being possible to reconstruct logically what
it would have to mean. The fourth can only be understood by drawing
mental lines between subjects and predicates and extending to the
author of the sentence a deep trust that normally you'd reserve for
someone with whom you were hopelessly in love. (By the way, see
New speech
disorder linguists contracted discovered! for further embedding
inspiration.)
Faced with the facts about starlings' innate ability to learn Dyck
languages, and with the facts about center embeddings for you and me, a
contrarian might well conclude that yes, at last, we have firm and
amazing evidence for a biologically unique language module. The trouble
is, starlings have it, and we don't.
Posted by David Beaver at April 28, 2006 04:08 AM