Babbler Birds and Babbling Journalists

Chestnut-crowned babblers (Photo: Aviceda, via Wikimedia Commons)

We have seen it before, with bonobos and monkeys and parrots and dogs and cows and dolphins. Even bats. Heaven knows how many beasts of the field and birds of the air have been the subjects of irresponsible science journalism claiming that animal behavior reveals how human language originated, or (more commonly) that they use language just like humans.

I have written many times on Language Log and occasionally on Lingua Franca about this phenomenon, mostly just mocking the silliness. (For a thoughtful reflection on the myth that chimps and gorillas have been taught human languages such as American Sign Language, see this post by Mark Seidenberg, and for more posts on animal communication, browse this archive.) But I can’t exhaustively mock the stories, because I can’t keep up with the flow. I never wrote about how “Gibbons may communicate as our ancestors did, scientists say,” or “Hyenas use a ‘laughing language’ to communicate,” or hundreds of other such stories.

Humans apparently yearn to believe truly absurd propositions about animals: that parrots have the cognitive abilities of 6-year-old human children, or that “Humans are not smarter than animals – we just don’t understand them.” (Read the latter story and see whether you think it really confirms the headline’s claim. It reports inter alia that koalas have special glands for leaving scent markings that other koalas can smell. Intellectual superiority indeed.)

Be it dinosaurs or baboons, science journalists are prepared to drink in news releases and regurgitate nonsensical reports. Generally it starts with some scientist writing an innocent paper about some statistical regularity in the noises some animal makes and the social or behavioral correlates thereof. Then a university publicist writes a not-quite-so-innocent news release that spices it up a bit. Then the science journalists simply plagiarize the release. And then the headline writers go hog wild: We can speak with the animals!

The latest case involves a small Australian bird called the chestnut-crowned babbler. Under some circumstances it goes “tweet-twoot” (or some such birdy noise sequence, the specific sounds don’t actually matter), while under other circumstances it goes “twoot-tweet-twoot”; and the other babblers seem to respond differently depending on whether they heard a tweet-twoot or a twoot-tweet-twoot. (Read the original paper in PLOS Biology here.)

And immediately we get headlines talking about this as evidence for language. “Babbler bird first non-human known to have language,” said the print edition of The Independent. The online science section was slightly more cautious: “Australian bird becomes first known non-human species to communicate using language.” But dozens of species have been alleged, in similarly overstated reports, to communicate using language.

Having distinct stimulus-bound calls composed of identifiable subparts is not communication using language. Though the newspapers will tell you otherwise: “Babbler birds use primitive language to communicate with meaning, study shows“; “These ‘babbler’ birds could shed light on human language“; “Babbler Birds Don’t Just Babble: They Communicate Like Humans“; and on it goes.

My interest in these silly animal-communication stories does not stem from any feeling that the public needs to be better informed. Efforts to find linguistic communication among animals have never succeeded, but no harm will result if people believe incorrectly that there is some prospect of this. (Personally, I earnestly wish we could explain things to animals.)

No, my interest lies not in persuading readers to disbelieve absurd falsehoods, but in studying the species Homo journalisticus. Why do the science journalists who offer these astonishingly unsupported and incoherent claims seem to know so little about human language? Could they really imagine that these snippets of evidence about subparts of context-associated animal cries, etc., can be interpreted as evidence of linguistic abilities?

Possibly, yes. You see, there’s a job that linguistics departments aren’t doing. The number of linguists employed in America is probably sufficient to ensure that (if somehow they could be evenly spread around) every undergraduate could take one course on language. But hardly any students take even one linguistics course. And I doubt that journalism students are any more likely to learn anything of linguistics than are students of law or chemistry. So they may not know about the gulf separating bird twitter from human Twitter.

Mark Liberman is probably right when he says I shouldn’t assume they are actually lying. It’s not mendacity, which involves deliberately saying things directly intended to lead people away from the truth; it’s more likely to be simple laziness and ignorance. The journalists don’t know much about human language and its properties, and they don’t much care. They’re not liars, Liberman believes. They’re just uninterested in whether they’re reporting truth or not. That’s very different.