April 28, 2006

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