Starlings The Bird That Can Learn Human Grammar

One of the things that set humans apart from what we consider to be “lesser” species is our innate ability to create and learn complex language.

 Although plenty of other animals have the capacity to make hundreds of different sounds and combine them in meaningful ways, scientists argue that the human language is special because it is much more complex than animal sounds.

Enter the European starling, a small, parasitic, black bird that has taken over North America after some Shakespeare fans thought it would be cool to release 100 of the birds in New York’s Central Park.
 Since then, over 200 million starlings have made it their life’s mission to aggressively drive other birds out of their homes and to recreate scenes from Hitchcock’s The Birds.

Starlings also happen to be excellent songbirds and mimics, which led scientists to wonder: Can starlings learn the complex grammar rules thought to be unique to the human language? The answer is yes, although very slowly.

 After months and thousands of trials, a group of starlings was taught to recognize and grasp a grammatical structure that for years had been considered unique to humans—inserting information into the middle of a sentence instead of at either end.

 So far, the starlings don’t seem to be able to use the rules they learned to respond to things that humans are doing, but we all know it’s only a matter of time before birds rule the world.