A teaching situation—left is a son and right is the father. Credit: Kazou Okanoya, Teikyo University, Japan.
An international team of researchers has uncovered a previously undetected structure in the birdsong of Bengalese finches that has the same statistical patterns found in human languages.
The songbirds—famous for their complex, learned songs—organize their songs using the same mathematical formula found in human speech, a trait that has developed over time and makes complex communication easier to learn and pass from one generation to the next.
The findings, published in the journal Science Advances, build on the team's previous discovery that humpback whales also rely on a similar systematic structure.
Language has long been considered a uniquely human trait, with features that mark it as distinct from the communication of all other species.
