No evidence for language syntax in songbird vocalizations

Abstract

The evolutionary origins of human language remain poorly understood and hotly debated. In a recent study published in Nature Communications (Suzuki and Matsumoto, 2022), the authors claim to have found evidence for what they call “Core-Merge” in the vocal communication of Japanese tits (Parus minor, a passerine bird species). As the authors suggest that Core-Merge—allowing senders to combine two words and receivers to recognize them as a single unit—is a cognitive capacity underlying human language, their findings would have important implications for the study of the evolution of language (Bolhuis et al., 2014). Here we argue that a role for Core-Merge in language evolution is not evident and that their study does not demonstrate Core-Merge in birds. Instead, we argue that their findings can be explained as differential responsiveness to distinctive vocalizations, based on concatenation of vocal utterances.