We often point to language as evidence of our species’ superiority. But the way humans learn language may not be so foreign to other animals, after all.
A new study has found that the lowly pigeon may provide insight into how young children acquire language. Researchers at the University of Iowa found that pigeons are able to categorize and name dozens of objects, which means they engage in a type of associative learning that children also use to learn new words.
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“We can and do study word learning in people, but they bring all sorts of high level reasoning abilities, problem solving strategies and background knowledge to the table,” study co-author Bob McMurray told The Huffington Post. “It can be difficult to strip these things out to really focus on and isolate the mechanisms of learning. By using an animal model like a pigeon we can observe learning in its rawest form and figure out how it works. It helps to isolate this one small part of how humans learn language and figure out what it can do.”
The findings were published online in the journal Cognition.
