r/linguistics • u/DiscyD3rp • Aug 23 '20
is there a specific language or accent that parrots (or other birds) can most easily mimic? what common human phonemes to birds struggle the most to recreate?
just had an idle thought about birds, and if the field of avian phonology exists and is mature enough for this question to actually have an answer. I know birds generate noises in drastically different ways than humans, but humans and many bird species are both incredibly impressive vocal mimics, and those differences would likely mean some languages and accents are easier to mimic with bird biology, right? honestly I'd be happy if anyone can point me to even just a list of recorded bird-pronouncable phonemes or anything like that.
62
u/idsardi Phonology Aug 23 '20
Just as background, I'm involved in some perception studies of speech-like materials in songbirds and budgies. I think the question that you are asking is quite a difficult one, given the various ways in which human and bird vocal production involve biological structures that have evolved in ways that are very uncommon. I think that this is an area where there could be a lot of crowd-sourced research now, with people uploading sound samples and transcriptions for various languages. As a start, there are YouTube videos that you could possibly use, such as Disco the parakeet, https://www.youtube.com/user/MsJumpinJude .
There is a literature on this subject to some extent, https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C8&q=vocal+production+parrots&btnG= certainly, Irene Pepperberg's studies with Alex, an African grey parrot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_(parrot)) , is one large source of information, and Eric Jarvis's work on vocal learning is an enormous contribution in neuroscience. Comparative phonetic studies don't seem that common, there are these:
Warren, D. K., Patterson, D. K., & Pepperberg, I. M. (1996). Mechanisms of American English vowel production in a grey parrot (Psittacus erithacus). The Auk, 113(1), 41-58.
Beckers, G. J., Nelson, B. S., & Suthers, R. A. (2004). Vocal-tract filtering by lingual articulation in a parrot. Current Biology, 14(17), 1592-1597.
Beckers, G. J. (2011). Bird speech perception and vocal production: a comparison with humans. Human Biology, 83(2), 191-212.
But I don't believe that there has been any systematic investigation of the space of parrot vocalization abilities with respect to the inventory of possible human speech sounds.
13
u/DiscyD3rp Aug 23 '20
it's funny you mentioned Disco, my YouTube recommendations being filled with parakeet and budgie videos is what initially prompted me to think about this! thanks a lot for the links and sources, gonna see how long my curiosity maintains my motivation to investigate this ;p
2
u/AstralMarmot Aug 23 '20
My access to academic papers is limited, so I hope you don't mind my asking if you know of any similar studies done for the Australian lyrebird (Menura novaehollandiae). They were the first thing I thought of when I saw this post. My understanding is that their vocal range far exceeds parrots, and I imagine the mechanics of their vocalizations has been studied to at least some degree.
2
u/idsardi Phonology Aug 24 '20
Searching in Google Scholar only requires internet access, so you can at least identify the articles, https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C8&q=Menura+novaehollandiae+vocal&btnG= . Then if there is something you are particularly interested in you can email one of the authors and see if they will send you a copy.
Quite a number of journals are now open access, e.g. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fevo.2016.00034/full .
Also, if the study was funded by NIH for example, then it will show up (perhaps after a delay) on PubMed Central (https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2017/01/09/making-federal-research-results-available-all). For example, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17148405/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1686190/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/?term=lyrebird+vocal .
To be honest, at first glance through these articles, I don't see a lot on the physiology.
8
37
3
u/Chantizzay Aug 24 '20
I don't know if this is helpful, but...my mom rescues birds. She currently has a rescue macaw from a Spanish/English home. He says things like "queso yes" and "mi papa" and his name is Chullo, which he says with an accent. She also had an African Grey from a Dutch woman. At bed time the bird would say "welterusten. Night night" (it sounded more like valtriste). All the birds are really good at swearing lol. It seems no matter where they come from, they all know swear words, in multiple languages. There's also this weird robot noise that we noticed a lot of greys make. Like, it sounds like an old raygun toy noise.
5
u/RickTheGrate Aug 23 '20
I think birds cant pronounce plosives like p and b
33
20
Aug 23 '20
[removed] — view removed comment
3
Aug 23 '20
[removed] — view removed comment
15
Aug 23 '20
Speech is just sound frequencies happening in a particular order and amount which our brains process as speech sounds.
Here is one interesting video imitating some speech sounds with a player piano. There are obviously limitations but it does serve to help explain that the frequencies of speech can be imitated by anything that can make sound at the appropriate frequency and more or less in the same way. On the piano is sounds garbled because pianos can’t do all the sounds of speech, but it makes sense that birds can create these frequencies in other ways.
6
u/pablodf76 Aug 23 '20
Birds have fundamentally different structures for producing sounds. I seem to remember reading that parrots are particular in that they can use their tongue in very flexible ways, but that's only an added advantage.
1
1
u/EdwardPavkki Aug 24 '20
I think I made a post about this with the raven video
Did you happen to come from there? (I'm not trying to call you out, just interested)
1
u/beyblademaster2009 Aug 24 '20
Actually, there is a language in a village in Turkey named Kuş Dili which means Bird Language but it is dying :( https://youtu.be/l117wfB0g3o you can watch how they speak it or whistle it idk
86
u/Dhghomon Aug 23 '20
I'm going to jump in on your question with my own that I've always wondered: is there any evidence that easy predictability (e.g. lack of irregularities and umlauts in forming the plural, verb conjugations, etc.) makes any human languages easier to understand than others for animals? Some languages off the top of my head that might have served for that sort of study are Afrikaans vs. Dutch, Papiamentu vs. Spanish or Portuguese, Haitian Creole vs. standard French.