Wednesday, May 03, 2006

Polly Wanna Gerund?

Birds can learn grammar. Okay, maybe you won’t find a bunch of crows sitting on a wire conjugating verbs, but according to a recent study,
certain starlings can distinguish between a regular birdsong “sentence” and one containing a clause or another sentence of warbling.

And it took UCSD researcher Tim Gentner just one month to train the birds to make the distinctions. So why does it take most Americans years to figure out the difference between “lie” and “lay” or “who” and “whom”?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Perhaps the leader of our country should hang out with a folck of birds for a while!

Anonymous said...

Make that a flock!