Dr. Erich Jarvis

And that's what I learned growing up as well and talked to Peter Mahler himself about before he passed.

He used to call it the innate predisposition to learn.

All right, so, which would be kind of the equivalent in the linguistic community of universal grammar.

There is something genetically influencing

our vocal communication on top of what we learn culturally.

And so there's this balance between the genetic control of speech or a song in these birds and the learned cultural control.

And so, yes, if you were to take

um you know um i mean in this case we we actually tried this at rockefeller later on take a zebra finch and raise it with a canary it would sing a song that was sort of like a hybrid in between we call it a caninch right and vice versa for the canary because there's something different about their vocal musculature or the gen or the circuitry in the brain

And with a zebra finch, even with a closely related species, if you would take a zebra finch, a young animal, and in one cage next to it, place its own species, adult, male, right?

And in the other cage, place a Bengalis finch next to it, it would preferably learn the song from its own species neighbor.

But if you remove its neighbor, it would learn that Bengalis finch very well.

Fantastic.

So it has something to do with also the social bonding with your own species, right?

What is going on here is cultural evolution remarkably tracks genetic evolution.

So if you bring people from two separate populations together that have been in their separate populations, evolutionarily at least,

for hundreds of generations.

So someone's speaking Chinese, someone's speaking English.

And that child then is learning from both of them.

Yes, that child is going to be able to pick up and merge phonemes and words together in a way that an adult wouldn't.

Because why they're experiencing both languages at the same time during their critical period