Humans Discriminate Individual Zebra Finches by their Song

Comparative experiments have greatly advanced the field of biolinguistics in the 21st century, but so far very little research has focused on human perception of non-human animal vocalizations. Studies with zebra finch (Taeniopygia guttata) songs found that humans cannot perceive the full range of acoustic cues that zebra finches hear in their songs, although it remained unclear how much individual information is lost. Individual heterospecific discrimination by humans has only been shown with rhesus monkey (Macaca mulatta) voices. The present study examined whether human adults could discriminate two individual zebra finches by their songs, using a forced- choice Same-Different Paradigm. Results showed that adults can discriminate two individual zebra finches with high accuracy and without prior training. Discrimination mostly relied on differences in pitch contour, but discrimination was still possible with lower accuracy when pitch contour was removed. Future studies should expand these findings with more diverse non-human animal vocalizations

The Phonological Latching Network

This paper gives an analysis of an attractor neural network model dubbed the Phonological Latching Network. The model appears to reproduce certain quintessentially phonological phenomena, despite not having any of these phonological behaviours programmed or taught to the model. Rather, assimilation, segmental-OCP, and sonority sequencing appear to emerge spontaneously from the combination of a few basic brain-like ingredients with a phonology-like feature system. The significance of this can be interpreted from two angles: firstly, the fact that the model spontaneously produces attested natural language patterns can be taken as evidence of the model’s neural and psychological plausibility; and secondly, it provides a potential explanation for why these patters appear to frequently in natural language grammars. Namely, they are a consequence of latching dynamics in the brain

Language in Language Evolution Research: In Defense of a Pluralistic View

Many controversies in language evolution research derive from the fact that language is itself a natural language word, which makes the underlying concept fuzzy and cumbersome, and a common perception is that progress in language evolution research is hindered because researchers do not ‘talk about the same thing’. In this article, we claim that agreement on a single, top-down definition of language is not a sine qua non for good and productive research in the field of language evolution. First, we use the example of the notion FLN (‘faculty of language in the narrow sense’) to demonstrate how the specific wording of an important top-down definition of (the faculty of) language can—surprisingly—be inconsequential to actual research practice. We then review four approaches to language evolution that we estimate to be particularly influential in the last decade. We show how their breadth precludes a single common conceptualization of language but instead leads to a family resemblance pattern, which underwrites fruitful communication between these approaches, leading to cross-fertilisation and synergies