Crows’ ability to discriminate between languages
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Crows’ ability to discriminate between languages
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Re: Crows’ ability to discriminate between languages
#2The Onion's take on crows research:
https://www.theonion.com/researchers-find-crows-smart-enough...
"Researchers Find Crows Smart Enough Not To Let On How Smart They Really Are"
Re: Crows’ ability to discriminate between languages
#3I read "Hollow Kingdom" a little while back, pretty good novel about how a crow that learned human language saves the world from a zombie invasion.
Re: Crows’ ability to discriminate between languages
#4Looking at the results, there doesn't seem to be a large difference between the two languages. And it is a very small sample size. I am not sure how to interpret it.
Here is a link to the paper: https://brussels.evolang.org/proceedings/paper.html?nr=10
> Language discrimination has previously been found in human infants, cotton-top tamarin monkeys, rats, and java sparrows. This ability might also be relevant for the crow, a social passerine with extensive auditory perceptual skills living in close contact with humans…
Re: Crows’ ability to discriminate between languages
#5Re: Crows’ ability to discriminate between languages
#6I read "Hollow Kingdom" a little while back, pretty good novel about how a crow that learned human language saves the world from a zombie invasion.
That sounded like such an unusual theme I had to go read up reviews :)
Re: Crows’ ability to discriminate between languages
#7This discussion on crow vocalizations linked in the blog post was a bit more interesting to me:
https://corvidresearch.blog/2019/03/14/crow-vocalizations-pa...
Demonstrates how little we know! Our inability to understand the relatively-simpler communication of other life on earth generally makes me think we would fail spectacularly if we ever meet aliens...
Re: Crows’ ability to discriminate between languages
#8"As with the carrion crow study, when these crows were presented with playback of a more familiar acoustic style—in this case a Japanese speaker—they didn’t show a strong reaction. Play them what was likely a completely unfamiliar language—Dutch—and the crows were rapt. Or at least they acted more vigilant and positioned themselves closer to the speaker. In other words, large-billed crows were able to discriminate between human languages without any prior training!"
I would be interested to hear the respective recordings - is it possible that something else in the speaker's voice (tone/manner/volume) that they were responding to?
Edit: Ok so i went looking in the original paper which describes the method and it looks quite thought out - though i would still love to hear the recording or see the video footage. (https://brussels.evolang.org/proceedings/papers/EvoLang13_pa...)
"We used twenty Dutch and twenty Japanese sentences as stimuli. They were all declarative, adult-directed, approximately 2.5 seconds long, and spoken by four female native speakers. After the habituation to the aviary on three consecutive days, the crows were tested for their responses to the Dutch and Japanese stimuli in a total of eight trials which were distributed over four days (i.e., two trials per day). Four crows received Dutch stimuli for the first four trials and Japanese stimuli for the last four trials, while the other three crows were assigned the opposite language order. Before the start of each trial, the crows were given 3–5 min for familiarization to the surroundings. Each trial consisted of four blocks of stimulus presentation with inter-block intervals of a 1–2-min silent period. Within each block, a set of ten sentences spoken by two different speakers was continuously presented twice in a random order. A 30 min silent period was inserted between the trials each day. The trial schedule including stimulus presentation was controlled by the programme PsychoPy 3 (Peirce, 2007). The sound level was set at a range between 70 and 80 dB across the perches. According to the different behavioural responses to 1,000 Hz and 1,600 Hz tone......"
Re: Crows’ ability to discriminate between languages
#9This discussion on crow vocalizations linked in the blog post was a bit more interesting to me: https://corvidresearch.blog/2019/03/14/crow-vocalizations-pa... Demonstrates how little we know! Our inability to understand the relatively-simpler communication of other life on earth generally makes me think we would fail spectacularly if we ever meet aliens...
There was a movie where the aliens patiently let humans try to devise a way to teach a way to communicate, but they were teaching the humans a superior way of communicating the whole time. Would be a spoiler if I said the movie name and you hadn't seen it.
I wouldn't be surprised if various domestic and cohabiting animals feel that way about us. A lot of what we do is built around verbal nuance but isn't really necessary to get the same results in our daily routine, acquiring goods or hunting, or sex. Analogous to how adult cats do not vocalize to each other (at least in a frequency we can hear), or a person that is into you doesn't really care what you say only the tone. Our hierarchy of needs and wants are a shared protocol already, and it is communicable to other people that don't speak the same language, other mammals, birds, and cephalopods without speaking.
Re: Crows’ ability to discriminate between languages
#10This discussion on crow vocalizations linked in the blog post was a bit more interesting to me: https://corvidresearch.blog/2019/03/14/crow-vocalizations-pa... Demonstrates how little we know! Our inability to understand the relatively-simpler communication of other life on earth generally makes me think we would fail spectacularly if we ever meet aliens...
If you haven't read him, this spectacular failure is the central theme of many of Stanislaw Lem's works. Worth a read if you like sci-fi.