They may not have verbs, nouns or past participles, but birds challenge the notion that humans alone have evolved grammatical rules.
Bengal finches have their own versions of such rules – known as syntax – says Kentaro Abe of Kyoto University, Japan.
"Songbirds have a spontaneous ability to process syntactic structures in their songs," he says.
To show a sense of syntax in the animals, Abe's team played jumbled "ungrammatical" remixes of finch songs to the birds and measured the response calls.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20615-first-evidence-that-birds-tweet-using-grammar.html
