Syntax has long been considered unique to human language, and language in turn is often thought to set humans apart from other animals. Yet Suzuki found it not in a bird typically celebrated for intelligence, like crows or parrots, but in humble P. minor.
The Nature paper linked in the NatGeo article is fascinating :
Here we find that Japanese great tits extract different meanings from ABC and D calls, and a compound meaning from ABC–D calls. As tits fail to produce a compound response when the note sequence is artificially reversed (D–ABC), these findings support the hypothesis that the communication system of tits represents semantically compositional syntax.
And back to NatGeo :
Once he realized that birds are using their own form of language, Suzuki wondered: what happens in their minds when they talk? Might words evoke corresponding images, as happens for us?
Suzuki tested that proposition by broadcasting recordings of P. minor’s snake-specific alarm call from a tree-mounted speaker. Then he analyzed the birds’ responses to a stick that he’d hung along the trunk and could manipulate to mimic a climbing snake.
If the call elicited a mental image, Suzuki figured the birds would pay extra-close attention to the snake-like stick. Indeed they did, he recently reported in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In contrast, when Suzuki broadcast a call used by tits to convey a general, non-specific alarm, the birds didn’t pay much notice to the stick. And when he set the stick swinging from side to side in a decidedly non-snakelike manner, the birds ignored it.
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/02/japanese-songbirds-process-language-syntax/
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