I have recently read an article called "Songbirds Offer Clues to How We Learn Language." The article reports a recent research on the Australian zebra finches: When the bird hears its father singing, certain genes in the bird’s brain get activated. It is a very interesting thought that hearing a song can actually alter the state of a gene in the brain. The relationship between language and speech, and a set of genes getting activated by a specific use of language serves as a further proof of the complexity of language learning and processing in the brain.
Up until now, many researchers attempted to teach language-like systems to different species of animals. Most of these attempts did not help much with explaining the idea of language in living creatures other than humans as their linguistic abilities seem to be rather limited. However, I believe that this research about the Australian zebra finches can bring a new insight to the linguistic abilities of animals.
One question to think about may be whether animals learn and process languages in a very different way than people do. If the process is similar both in humans and animals, can this really tell us something about disorders that inhibit speech, like autism?
It almost seems like a reversed process to trace the roots of autism by language. The genes in the songbird's brain that get activated by a song may be similar to those in the human brain which are also responsible for language processing and speech. Then, with autistic people, these genes would be deactivated, so that they would inhibit speech.
At this point, what I wonder is that if scientists manage to find a similarity between the genes regarding language processing and speech of the songbird and human, would it be possible to find a "song" to activate the genes in the human brain? Can this actually offer a way to improve the language development in autistic people which the disease greatly impedes?
(Link to the article: http://www.usnews.com/science/articles/2010/04/01/songbirds-offer-clues-to-how-we-learn-language.html).
great questions! what are some of the differences between human language and bird song (or other types of animal communication more generally) that you can think of?
ReplyDeleteone thing that's so impressive about humans is the sheer variety of languages we are able to learn. we come equipped to start learning english or turkish or kuuk thaayorre, even though these languages are totally different from one another.