What do Artificial Grammar Learning Experiments tell about Animal Rule Learning Abilities?

Carel ten Cate.

Institute of Biology Leiden & Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition, Leiden University

 

The abilities of non-human animals to learn and abstract grammatical rules may provide a window on the origin of human rule grammatical learning abilities – an area of controversies. A central question in this debate is whether the computational and learning mechanisms that guide learning about language structure are special and specific to language or humans. This question can only be answered by examining the rule learning abilities of other species and exploring the similarities and differences. In our work we address this issue by studies on birds, using the artificial grammar paradigm. I will present an overview of this work and relate our findings to those in other species and those obtained in humans.