Via Great Minds Working and Slashdot: neurobiologists at MIT are studying the role of the basal ganglia in bird songs, in an effort to learn more of the BG‘s role in human L1A (first language acquisition) & language processing.
Here’s MIT’s press release
I think the fact that this comparison between birds and humans is of particular interest, especially in the way that it calls established evolutionary theories into question. Most all evolutionary accounts of language I’ve read about have said human language arises out of gesture and social interactions in primates. Given, however, that that birds are so distant from humans from an evolutionary standpoint, this “parallel evolution” between chirps and words, songs and paragraphs, could help us understand a different story about the low-level functioning of the BG. It could be parallel evolution, or it could be that the human basal ganglia wasn’t honed by evolutionary pressures of social interaction after all–that it was already sufficiently developed for these tasks in the brains of animals simpler than primates.
Here’s the full research study (which I will read in my copious spare time).