Some research suggests songbirds will match or not match another bird's notes during a counter-duet to either escalate or de-escalate a situation. Dahlin was curious about the possibility, but soon realized she couldn't study the warble duet matching patterns until she knew how many call types the birds were actually using. "That started this whole process."
Significantly, Dahlin said, they found what are known in human language as collocates, words that are often paired together"for example, "eat" and "food" or "grass" and "green."
The group uncovered more than 20 syntactic rules that the duets followed. Even so, there was very little repetition within a duet, which lasted for 5"10 seconds. "This shows that the parrots are being very precise," Dahlin said. "They are not simply throwing random notes around."
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