Bird and cetacean grammar, and series conclusion – Can Animals Grammar? #8

Can animals grammar? If there's any grammatical communication to be found in species other than humans, surely it's in the complex songs of birds and whales. Today, let's finish up my grammanimals journal with highlights from everything I read about the animal linguistics of songbirds and cetaceans. Cetaceans are famous for the way they transmit high-range sounds widely through their aquatic medium, including percussives, clicks, pulses, whistles and songs. Individual dolphins, as we learned early on in grammanimals, use unique signature whistles for themselves when they get stranded apart from a group. They're also known for their high clicks, for echolocation and maybe for more. Indeed, bottlenose dolphin clicks pass computational tests for communication. Still, as ever, their function remains unclear. What is known enables humans to create dolphin chat systems, allowing researchers to label objects with whistles, or even let dolphins greet you with a whistle for your dolphin name. Orcas produce three types of vocalizations: short pulses for echolocation, tonal whistles in close interactions, and a variety of pulsed calls. They're so "family oriented" their burst pulses convey a signature for the whole pod not the individual. When confined together they'll even develop a shared "'tank' call". Wondering what's here besides identity, researchers processed tens of thousands of hours to find semantics and syntax in "Orchive". (Heh, punny blend. ) Using that method a new call type has already been found, these "rare" ones from nonresident whales passing through that were previously undescribed. Then there are the singing whales. Male humpbacks repeat these extraordinary songs composed of "units" nested inside of a "phrase"; phrases repeat within a "theme"; four to seven themes make a "song". With much study they've been heard to sing for minutes up to even hours. Songs aren't fixed. Whales may alter songs gradually over time, or in cases shift to a new song. But, let's say it together, the function remains unknown. The compositionality paper I mentioned before wonders if it's an interesting case of wholes that mean but parts that don't, while another paper is intrigued by the possibility of their ingressive and egressive channels compositionally sending two messages at once. (Speculative; interesting. ) Still another follows the singing metaphor to its core: is this more music than language? Toothed whales don't sing, and yet there's still some love for them in the literature. Narwhals are only recently heard producing two types of patterns, and one of them appears in ten different types of sequences. Again, hard to pinpoint the function, but these aren't individual signatures and they're not about feeding. Toothed whale communication in general is still understudied compared to whalesong. Singers swim; they also fly. As is so well known, songbirds emit their sounds both beautiful and harsh for territory or courtship. They take turns in bird duets. Birds who "eavesdrop on singing contests" have even been found to shift their behavior toward winners and losers. The word "syntax" has often been used when discussing their communication structure. I've read they're already much more richly described than primate syntax. Playback studies that alter their sequences mainly find that birds can spot differences and that messing with their structure degrades meaning. "Meaning" is a loaded word here – elaborate as they get, many of my sources take pains to put quite a lot of distance between bird syntax and human grammar. Ok, that said, let's admire some birds. Zebra finches learn a single song "motif" with multiple syllables and then repeat that motif throughout their lives. They are still sensitive to reversing syllables but not as much to rearranging the sequence. Budgies on the other hand have complex calls and warble songs and readily detect song elements that don't belong. Order also matters to song sparrows, who sing about nine very unique songs built from a handful of elements. In what's been called a "'Dear Enemy' relationship", they start territory negotiations from shared song conventions in a "graded" call system that works like this. First, commit another bird's singing repertoire to memory. Then, start singing. When another bird responds, you have four options: continue the same song, switch to a different shared song

switch to an unshared song, or stop singing. One researcher says this is all just a conflict management system, where the whole thing means how much you're willing to de-escalate. The common name for you just got me the wrong search results, so ~ "四十雀" / "Parus minor" ~ combines an alert "chicka" with a recruitement call to form a new "alert-recruitment" complex for mobbing a threat. Papers are willing to admit the birds do form and interpret this as a compositional call, perhaps one of the clearest examples we've met, which would be amazing, but questions remain. Chickadees, ah! They sing four notes in order. They can sing one note multiple times, step up to the next note, or skip notes, but they don't for example start a sequence on the fourth note and then sing the first. Individual notes may have specific meanings or functions. Some sequences might, too: this disturbance sequence seems built from a restless move note and a redirect note. And then there are corvids. They gesture and make a range of calls. American Crows more than 30, Northern Ravens over 70, Australian corvids more than 80. Raven vocalization varies by continent, location, even mated pair. Much of the attention goes toward not how they call but how they think, corvid smarts. Testing several ravens on trials designed for primates, the ravens proved a match for apes in most cognitive tasks. One researcher asks, "Are corvids 'feathered apes'? " Watch how they stack up when it comes to recursion. (Ask a syntactician or programmer, or apparently a crow! ) Take a look at these brackets. How would you arrange them? Train humans, macaques and crows to nest one pair inside the other, and the crows outperform macaques and about as well as human children. Add new brackets and an extra layer of nesting, and the crows still do exceptionally well at three levels of recursion. So this paper concludes that "crows join humans" in our ability to think recursively. "Bird brains" are capable brains. But now we've gone from animal signals to animal cognition. I doubt at heart our speculative curiosity was rooted in a desire to study signal sequence structure. When we find out that corvids nest brackets, that jacky dragons perform action sequences, that young birds babble as they go through stages of vocal learning, that dolphins can distinguish "take the ball to the hoop" versus "take the hoop to the ball", or that Campbell's monkeys add suffixes to their calls, it opens windows into their lives, their "sensory worlds". Peeking through those windows confronts us with an inconsistency: how much do we really consider them and their communication systems? Like, smack in the middle of studying about orcas and whales, I learn that ocean noise including cargo shipping increasingly stresses them out and disturbs their ability to signal. When those with a heart for animals hear this, we ask about ways to help. I'll wrap up this video and this whole project by pointing to organizations that support our fellow nonhumans as well as people living in and caring for biodiverse areas. Places rich in linguistic diversity are often the same places rich in biodiversity, hmm... suspicious fact about our planet that. Ok. It's past time to close my animated grammanimals journal, and to thank subscribers and patrons for sticking with me through so many months of research and production. This one meant a lot to me. To everyone watching at home, thank you for joining me on this eight-part journey through animal grammar. Stick around and subscribe for more about languages and cultures.