Bolden and italicize words

Animals and human language

COMMUNICATIVE AND INFORMATIVE SIGNALS

- There are communicative signals (when you intentionally inform someone of something, “I want to
apply for the position of surgeon at this hospital”.) and informative signals (when you
unintentionally inform someone of something. Like you having a strange accent tells someone you’re
not from around here.) This counts for both humans and animals.

FT: Communicate signals are intentional information. “I like big tits.” While informative signals are
unintentionally signalling, i.e. me staring at your big tits with a happy expression, therefore signalling
that they are to my liking.

DISPLACEMENT

- The property of human language that allows us to determine the when and where, and allows us to
talk about things that may not even exist, is called displacement. Animal communication seems to
lack this feature. An animal is living in the present and in the here. When a dog is barking, it’s
because there is a threat here, now, not there, a week ago. An exception is perhaps bees, these are
still hindered however by the unproductivity and non-duality of their language

FT: Displacement. Attribute of human language that allows it to express spatial and temporal depths.
“I was over there two days ago. I think I’ll go there again tomorrow.” An animal can’t do this.

ARBITRARINESS

- is the feature of human language that describes its abstractness. There is no real connection
between a linguistic form and its meaning. Not knowing the language and seeing the word “Hund”,
will not make us think of the dog. Neither will seeing a dog in real life, make us think of the
corresponding words “Hund”, “chien” or “pes”, if the connection has not already been established.
Almost no human words are onomatopoeic.

- Animal language does not seem to share this feature, likely due to its fixed and limited amounts of
sounds and gestures. They are mostly used only in specific situations, such as when being
threatened, or mating.

FT: A dog does not have the different names (from different languages) for its species floating above
its head. Neither does one see a dog or understand what it is when reading the word. Linguistic form
and its meaning have no real connection. It is arbitrarily assigned by us. Animal language isn’t
arbitrary. Specific sounds and gestures are fixed as a reaction to specific stimuli.

PRODUCTIVITY

- Humans are continually creating new concepts and sentences. This is possible thanks to the fact
that human language is almost infinite in its potential/productivity. This attribute seems to be lacking
in animals, they cannot create new sounds to react to new events and also have a very limited
amount of possible expressions. Cicadas have four signals, while vervet monkeys have 36 vocal calls.

- Animal communication suffers under what is called fixed reference. Each signal is directly related to
a fixed object or occasion and will not be subject to change. It is unproductive
FT: Due to its duality, human language is infinitely productive. A large amount of sounds given
structure and therefore meaning. This allows us to name and describe things we’ve never seen
before, such as a flying snake, if the need arises. Animal language is not productive, it is stuck in its
fixed reference. Each signal is directly related to a fixed object or occasion and will not be subject to
change.

CULTURAL TRANSMISSION

- is the process of a human baby learning the language spoken in his surroundings, and not the
language of his genetic parents, if the two are different. A Korean baby raised by Americans will
speak English. Animals on the other hand seem to have instinctive language responses, although, if
raised in isolation from others of their species, these are somewhat aberrant. They do exist however.
A human baby raised in isolation will learn and exhibit no language whatsoever.

FT: A human baby learns its language form its environment, not its genetics. Animals have instinctive
language, although it comes out odd without any influence from others of its species.

DUALITY

- Human language exists on two levels. The physical sound, n, b, i and the sound given meaning from
its structure, bin. This is an extremely economic feature which allows humans to express many words
but only know a few sounds. Animals do not share this property. A dog does not make a woof out of
w, o, o and f. It is and always will be woof. Never cut apart and put together differently to create a
different meaning.

FT: Physical sound given meaning by structure. Duality in chaos and form creating with its melding a
world of infinite linguistic possibilities. A dog can only woof. Not w, o, o, f.

TALKING TO ANIMALS

- There is a lot of human speech directed at animals, such as heel for dogs, whoa for horses etc.
However, the animals have not in fact learned to speak. They’ve simply been trained to recognize
noise. After all, if an animal grows up with species of animals, it will not start reproducing the sounds.
A horse will not moo, no matter how long it lives with cows.

CHIMPANZEES AND LANGUAGE

- An experiment has shown that while chimps can learn the meaning of at least a few dozen words.
They simply do not have the vocal tracts to articulate any of them. One chimp managed to badly
articulate three words after five years of training.

WASHOE
- What about sign language though? Washoe learned to produce approx. a hundred signs and even
showed the barest hints of productivity in their use. “Water bird”, upon seeing a swan.

SARAH AND LANA

- Sarah and Lana were conditioned by food rewards to manipulate symbol blocks and a symbolic
keyboard. This was referred to as language learning, but has more in common with the usage of a
vending machine. The correct symbol in the correct order. Even a monkey could learn it.

THE CONTROVERSY
- Herbert Terrace argued that it was simply conditioning. No understanding of language took place.
The chimps were simply performing sophisticated tricks. The Gardners argued that chimps also used
sign language with other chimps, with no humans present.
KANZI
- While the target of the training was Kanzi’s mother, it was actually he who learned up to 250
symbols through exposure, and was then able to utilize his knowledge by age eight, to ask to watch
his favourite movies.

THE BAREST RUDIMENTS OF LANGUAGE

- Were Washoe and Kanzi capable of interaction with the human-invented symbol system? Yes. On
the same level as a human child of that age? No. Perhaps there is also some bias, that while a human
baby babbling is obviously learning the language, a chimp doing the same is a stupid conditioned ape.

STUDY QUESTIONS

1.The evidence that language is culturally transmitted is the fact that a genetic Korean will learn
English if adopted by English-speaking parents.

2. A productive communication system will be able to find the sequence of sounds or words to
describe a completely new phenomena, such as, ‘Look out for that flying snake’, while a fixed
reference communication system will do no such thing since it is fixed only on a specific object or
occasion.

3. Displacement is the property of language that lets people talk about the future and place. In this
case, the displacement is temporal.

4.The Gardners attempted to show that Washoe was not simply repeating signs showed by humans
by showing that she could identify objects and pictures with no humans present to induce a cue-
response.

5. If Sarah uses a grey symbol block to say red, her language has the attribute of arbitrariness.

6. The key element of Kanzi’s learning was early exposure to language in use.

RESEARCH TASKS

A: Sound symbolism is the idea that vocal sounds carry meaning in on itself, this is contrary to the
arbitrary attribute theory of human language, which says that sounds are created to be given
meaning only in a certain structure-form.

B: The clever Hans phenomenon is named so after a horse who supposedly knew how to do
arithmetic, but was actually only responding to the subconscious cues of the trainer’s body, who
knew the answer.

C: Neam Chimpsky was the name of the chimp in Terrace’s experiment. It’s a joke about Noam
Chomsky, who claimed humans are wired to develop language.

D: Bonobos are a less aggressive species; this likely makes them easier to work with. They are also
more empathic.