Language detection in... birds?
Ah yes, the old Friday evening blog post. Yes I should be on my way home, but there's heavy traffic on SR-520 again, so I'm going to sit it out here for a while.
And what better news to pass on than an AFP report that researchers in Japan have trained birds (Java Sparrows, which are apparently very accomplished songbirds) to do foreign language recognition - that is, to request food on the basis of whether they are hearing an English or a Mandarin Chinese translation of a Japanese novel. The findings: 75% accuracy. although it's not clear what this means in terms of precision vs recall (nor whether we should be worried that it's only 25% off pure chance).
Anyway, I'm not sure what this really tells us. The researchers think there might be correlations to speech recognition in the human brain. I think it's probably more about the differences between English and Mandarin in patterns of rhythm and (especially) tone that happen to map to the birds' own tonal patterns of song production and recognition.
But any study that involves reading Japanese novels in translation to caged birds deserves more poetry than this. Go home, Spotter.
