Thread: When talk is cheep-–birds can hold conversations just like humans

When talk is cheep – birds can hold conversations just like humans

https://www.pressreader.com/uk/the-d...81603837281430

The Daily Telegraph - Saturday

By Telegraph Reporter Science Advances
8 Aug 2026

BIRDSONG shows patterns similar to human language, according to a new study.

Researchers say Bengalese finches – known for their complex songs – organize their singing using the same mathematical formula found in human speech.

Language has long been considered a uniquely human trait, with features that mark it out as distinct from the communication of all other species.



Bengalese finches organize their singing with a formula also found in human speech

However, the researchers say their latest findings suggest that some of language’s most fundamental building blocks may not be uniquely human after all, but a universal feature of learned communication.

Their findings, published in the journal build on the team’s previous discovery that humpback whales also rely on a similar systematic structure. The study suggests that, like human language, communication for songbirds and humpback whales is an evolutionary solution, with the structure of songs crucial to learning.

While scientists have long known that songbirds learn their songs by listening to adult birds, the study goes a step further by showing that the songs themselves are organized according to the same statistical principles that help human babies learn spoken language.

The research team – including scientists from the University of Edinburgh – used methods inspired by how babies discover words in speech, and applied them to song data collected from Bengalese finches in Japan.

They observed that the finch songs contained statistically coherent sequences of notes – the avian equivalent of “words” – and the sequences followed the same patterns observed in human language where a few words are used very frequently and others are used more rarely, known as a Zipfian distribution.

The researchers found that young songbirds listen to the sounds around them to unconsciously learn the statistical patterns of the sounds and organize their songs–similar to how babies figure out where one word ends and the next begins by recognizing which sounds frequently occur together.

The statistical process is thought to make language easier to learn, helping infants identify recurring “chunks” of speech within the continuous stream of sounds they hear every day.

Leaders of the study, together with Dr Ellen Garland from the University of St Andrews, said the new findings suggest that some of the fundamental building blocks that make language learnable can emerge wherever communication is learned and passed from one generation to the next–even in the songs of birds.

Prof Simon Kirby, a study co-leader from the University of Edinburgh, said: “We have become used to the idea that language is unique in the natural world.

“By using insights from how babies learn language we’ve been able to take a closer look at birdsong, and have discovered a commonality between these species separated by more than 300 million years of evolution.”

‘We have discovered a commonality between species separated by 300 million years of evolution’