The European Starling might make that a compliment, rather than an insult...Apparently these birds can recognise complicated grammars that were thought to have been the exclusive privilige of humans !
Some excerpts...
A common characteristic of human grammar is inserting words and clauses within a sentence, without limit.But this belief might received a serious challenge...further excerpts...
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Chomskian linguists believe that this characteristic, known as recursive centre embedding, is a universal feature of human language, and the ability to process it forms the core of human language ability.
Gentner and colleagues generated 16 artificial starling songs, which followed two different patterns.
Similar to human grammar, the first set allowed for a sound to be inserted in the middle of a song, a simple form of recursive center embedding.
The next set of eight songs followed the finite state rule, whereby a sound could only be added at the beginning or end, a type of structure attributed to non-human communications.
After more than 10,000 trials, nine birds eventually learned how to distinguish the patterns of the two songs.
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To see if the birds could use the same rules to distinguish patterns of longer pieces, the researchers then subjected the birds to longer strings of song. And the birds were able to make the distinctions.
Wonder what, if anything, can be used to distinguish human "intelligence" from those aof animals now...
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