Are there parallels between the acquisition of language in humans and the ability to communicate through song in birds? According to a study carried out by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), such similarities exist even at the genetic level, since up to 55 genes – among them, FOXP2, known as the ” language gene” – show a similar pattern in activity. human brain and that of birds capable of learning new vocalizations.
Darwin already said in The Origin of Man (1871) that the sounds emitted by birds constitute, in several respects, the closest analogy to language . Likewise, MIT linguistics professor Morris Halle stated that “all human languages have a finite number of stress and rhythmic patterns, just like birdsong.” Well, now a recent MIT study published in Science provides another similarity, in this case genetics.
Andreas Pfenning and his collaborators have compared the maps of genetic activity – transcriptomes – of the brain tissue of three birds capable of learning vocalizations : the zebra finch, the parakeet and Ana’s hummingbird (Calypte anna). Then they also compared these genetic maps with others taken from birds and primates that cannot learn new vocalizations, and with the genetic maps of the brains of six people who donated tissue to the Allen Brain Institute in Seattle (USA).
With all this, the scientists verified that the FOXP2 or language gene is one of the 55 genes that show a similar pattern in the activity of the brain of humans and birds capable of vocalizing. On the contrary, these genes show different patterns of activity in the brains of animals incapable of vocal learning.
These results suggest that songbirds may be a perfect animal model for studying the genetics underlying speech production. The question is interesting for its potential medical applications in disorders such as Huntington’s disease, which affect the ability to speak. Songbird experiments could reveal the particular genes involved in these disorders.
And it is that language is not only a cultural construction, but it is based in part on capacities that humans share with other species . In fact, according to another MIT study, human language would have arisen from a combination of the forms of birdsong and the communication of other primates. From the birds the melodic part of our language would be derived; of non-human primates, the pragmatic part, which carries the content of the discourse. At some point in the last 100,000 years, both capacities merged to give rise to human language as we know it.
