In March of 2016, a group of scientists reported a discovery from the forests of central Japan. Writing in Nature Communications, Dr. Toshitaka Suzuki and his team announced that compositional syntax, the property of speech that enables it to “express limitless meanings,” was not unique to human languages. It had been observed in the vocal system of a bird. The paper sparked a flurry of tweets. It was also picked up the popular press, and for good reason. Given the putative role of syntax in expressing higher order thought in humans, its presence in an avian vocal system suggested that when a bird sings it is not simply naming a stimulus in its immediate environment but, rather, expressing a thought.
