LiveScience: The love songs of humpback whales may sound free-flowing and improvised, but mathematical analysis shows that they follow complex grammatical rules.

LiveScience: Researchers say the bird can recognize a feature of grammar that has long been thought to be unique to human languages — but not everyone accepts the claim.

To show a sense of syntax in the animals, Abe's team played jumbled, "ungrammatical" remixes of finch songs to the birds and measured the response calls.

He then asked human test subjects, with no prior knowledge of whale songs or particular expertise in grammar, to classify each song according to the same criteria the computer used to break them up.