Babbler Birds Speak Like Humans: How Language Evolved

Stringing together meaningless sounds in order to create meaningful ones was once thought to be a human trait alone. Now, scientists have discovered that a species of bird, babbler birds, can also communicate this way.

In this case, the scientists found that the chestnut-crowned babbler, a highly social bird found in the Australian Outback, has the ability to convey new meaning by rearranging the meaningless sounds in its calls.

"Although previous studies indicate that animals, particularly birds, are capable of stringing different sounds together as part of a complex song, these songs generally lack a specific meaning and changing the arrangement of sounds within a song does not seem to alter its overall message," said Sabrina Engesser, one of the researchers, in a news release. "In contrast to most songbirds, the chesnut-crowned babblers do not sing. Instead its extensive vocal repertoire is characterized by discrete calls made up of smaller acoustically distinct individual sounds."

The researchers first noticed that the babblers reused two sounds-A and B-in different arrangements when performing specific behaviors. When flying, the birds produced a flight call, AB. When feeding chicks, though, the birds produced the call BAB.

What was interesting was that while the birds showed that they were capable of discriminating between the different call types by looking at the nests when they heard a feeding prompt call and by looking out for incoming birds when they heard a flight call, they also could distinguish calls when the researchers made flight calls from prompt element and prompt calls from flight elements. This meant that the two calls were generated from the same rearrangement of sounds.

"Although this so-called phoneme structuring is of the very simple kind, it might help us understand how the ability to generate new meaning initially evolved in humans," said Simon Townsend, one of the researchers. "It could be that when phoneme structuring first got off the ground in our hominid ancestors, this is the form it initially took."

The findings are published in the journal PLOS Biology.

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