The 15-Minute Scientist by Anne Rooney

Author:Anne Rooney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcturus Holdings

When researchers played back recordings of the signature sounds, each dolphin which heard its own name responded by repeating its sound – so you could call a dolphin register, if you had a lot of dolphins. They found, too, that dolphins would move closer to a speaker which played the signature sound of an individual already known to them. Around half of all dolphin-speech comprises signature sounds; there is a lot of work still to be done to find out what they are saying in the other half.

Saying and singing

Birdsong sounds very different from human speech, but researchers have found that both use the same brain mechanism controlled by 55 of the same genes. The research consisted of sequencing the genomes of 48 types of songbird and analysing their brains, and looking at how birds learn their songs. Like young humans, young songbirds first babble and stutter as they learn to ‘speak’. Again like humans, songbirds can be bilingual. Scientists hope that by studying songbirds they might be able to learn more about how humans develop speech and perhaps help treat speech disorders.

Besides songbirds, parrots and hummingbirds can learn to make new sounds. They sometimes put their skill to use imitating human speech. There are many examples of parrots and mynah birds that apparently use human language – but how much (if anything) do they understand of what they ‘say’?

Who spoke first?

Birds have been around much longer than human beings. Early birds appeared around 150 million years ago, and they greatly diversified around 55 million years ago, whereas the earliest species of humans appeared only around 2 million years ago. We don’t even know whether early humans used language.

NOT JUST LANGUAGE

Birds don’t limit their imitation skills to simply copying human speech. Parrots can learn to whistle, and even to copy the barking of a familiar dog. Some songbirds such as starlings also copy the noises made by inanimate objects including telephones, car alarms and chainsaws – which can sound irritating and even alarming if you don’t know it’s a bird.

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