To test this, the bats were raised in conditions where they could hear their own mums, but also the hubbub of an entirely different colony using different group-specific calls. The Tel Aviv team wondered if the same applied to bats. Research into distinctive vocalisation among other animals – songbirds, in particular – has established that the young learn their specific “lyrics” by imitating a single tutor, usually their mother. Yovel and his colleagues set out to investigate how this phenomenon arises. This phenomenon was first recorded by Janette Wenrick Boughman and Gerald Wilkinson of the University of Maryland in 1997. It has been known for several years that such colonies – which often comprise large numbers of unrelated individuals – develop group-specific calls, or dialects. The pups were able to hear their mothers but were also played recordings of entire bat colonies chattering away. In a report published in the journal PLOS Biology, the scientists describe raising 14 bat pups in artificial colonies. Usually when researchers set out to examine how various species – especially mammals – learn to vocalise, factors such as genetic programming and environmental influence prove impossible to pick apart.Ī team led by Yossi Yovel at the school of zoology at Israel’s Tel Aviv University, however, came up with a novel way of interrogating the question. The discovery throws up an interesting challenge to the idea that humans are unique in the way we pick up language skills.
*Most Yoruba tutors on iTalki also speak Pidgin so you can have the same tutor for both Yoruba and Pidgin.Young bats pick up the dialect of their colony rather than simply mimicking the sounds made by their mothers, research has demonstrated. I believe there are Yoruba and Hausa tutors there as well.īecause there is no standard way of writing Pidgin, and because many Pidgin speakers are illiterate, listening & speaking > reading & writing so do not waste your time. You pay a little bit of money, (typically less than $7) and you can get them to tutor you for an hour. There are several teachers there, a handful of which speak Nigerian Pidgin. However the resource I recommend the most is a website called “ iTalki”. There are no great resources for learning, so I would recommend watching BBC Pidgin and just listening to people speak the language. There aren’t many resources online as the language is usually just picked up after living in Nigeria and it is not typically learned per se. I’m not saying learning Pidgin abroad is not possible, but it will be very difficult. There are several dialects, some of which are mutually unintelligible. Pidgin is not a language with complex grammar rules, spelling, standardization etc.
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