Lambda the Ultimate

Research on Teaching Birds to Sing. Since we periodically delve into general language issues, I thought this work might be of interest since it is related to language learning.

Learning how baby sparrows learn to sing their songs could provide clues to how humans learn to speak languages. University of Utah biologist Gary J. Rose and his colleagues have taught baby sparrows to sing a complete song, even though the birds were exposed only to overlapping segments of the tune rather than the full melody.

(Though, we still appear years away from providing a general purpose PL for the winged community. And even then, we'll have to engage a full combinatory community).