In the second lecture, we examined the spontaneous vocal communication abilities of different animal species. In non-human primates, these abilities are limited to the production of alarm calls that refer to the different types of predator encountered. Only rudimentary syntax has been reported, for example in Campell's monkeys. The ability to compose complex, intentional messages seems totally absent, so parallels with human language are very limited.
This is not the case with songbirds. As Darwin already pointed out, birds have to learn to sing, and this learning follows stages of babbling and gradual convergence towards the target " words " that have close parallels with the learning of phonology and vocabulary in children. The neural mechanisms of vocal production, and even the genetics of these brain networks, are remarkably parallel in the bird and human brain. On the other hand, at the syntactic level, there is - ? - hardly any evidence that any bird species is capable of producing compound sentences, organized according to a syntax comparable to that of human languages. Only a few complex long-distance dependency relationships have been reported in the canary, and a form of semantic Combinatorics based on syllable count in the black-capped chickadee. In conclusion, apart from human language, no spontaneous animal communication system appears to use complex syntax to refer to Combinatorics content.
