Animals and Language
"Animals and Language" explores the communication abilities of non-human animals, including their use of vocalizations, gestures, and other forms of expression. Researchers investigate the extent to which animals can comprehend and produce language, as well as the underlying cognitive processes involved. This field of study sheds light on the similarities and differences between human and animal communication systems.
6 Key excerpts on "Animals and Language"
eBook - ePubThe Development of Children's Thinking
Its Social and Communicative Foundations
- Jeremy Carpendale, Charlie Lewis, Ulrich Muller(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications Ltd(Publisher)
...Without a clear definition of language, we have no criteria at hand to determine whether animals do have a language. And attempting to define it helps to refine our understanding of just what human language is. Like Rico, apes can also learn certain communication skills, but the question remains: is this what is essential about language? Other reasons for studying animal communication include the fact that it is interesting to observe how other species cooperate, coordinate efforts and convey information. This research contributes to understanding the evolution of language. One way to study the evolution of a capacity is to examine the fossil record, but language itself leaves no trace (although some physical structures, such as specialised brain structures and skeletal evidence indicating the size of the vocal chords, may leave a fossil record). Since it is not possible to study the evolution of spoken communication fully in this manner, another way is to look at the distribution of varying capacities for language in currently living species. That is, to see if closely related species communicate in a way that is similar to human language. Before discussing the research, it is important to know something about studies of animal communication. It is a fairly unusual area of research because of the amount of controversy it has generated. It is also unusual because of the amount of public interest in this work. One of the important researchers in this area, David Premack, acknowledged that he should have anticipated the amount of interest and controversy this research would generate, but that it was hard to prepare for this because there are few areas in psychology that are similar. Most psychologists just tend to work away by themselves with little attention from the outside world, but the chimpanzee language work was different...
eBook - ePubAnimal Learning and Cognition
An Introduction
- John M. Pearce(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Psychology Press(Publisher)
...Animal communication and language DOI: 10.4324/9781315782911-13 Animal Communication Communication and Language Can an Ape Create a Sentence? Language Training with Other Species The Requirements for Learning a Language Defining precisely what is meant by animal communication is a surprisingly difficult task that can readily lead to controversy. For present purposes, however, a useful definition is that communication occurs when one organism transmits a signal that another organism is capable of responding to appropriately. By interpreting this statement loosely, a wide range of species can be said to communicate. One of the simplest creatures, the protozoan, can influence the movement of others by secreting a chemical; during courtship, the male fruit-fly stimulates the female by producing a sound with its wings; and the chimpanzee uses a range of sounds, facial expressions, and smell to influence the behavior of other members of its social group. The fact that animals are able to communicate with each other raises a variety of related questions. What sort of information do they communicate? How does the ability to communicate develop? Does one animal communicate with the intention of influencing another’s behavior, or is the act of communication little more than a response to a certain stimulus? The purpose of the first part of this chapter is to address these questions by focusing on selected examples of communication by different species. Other questions that are inevitably raised in discussions of animal communication concern their ability to use language. For example, to what extent does animal communication resemble language, and can animals be taught a language? The most important intellectual capacity possessed by humans is language. By use of the spoken word we are able to live together in large and more or less harmonious social groups; we can teach our children an enormous range of skills; and we can also express our feelings and our thoughts...
eBook - ePubThe Wisdom of the Liminal
Evolution and Other Animals in Human Becoming
- Celia Deane-Drummond(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Eerdmans(Publisher)
...Chapter Five Human Language and Animal Communication Perhaps of all the qualities purported to be most characteristic of humans, language is the one that is more often than not cited as a basis for arguing that humans should exercise supremacy over other creatures. Yet analysis of the way other creatures communicate with each other illuminates both common and distinctive evolutionary bases for human language and the way it developed and diversified in social communities. After touching on philosophical issues of why language has become of such central concern to present-day humans, I intend in this chapter to build on the discussion in chapter 2 of how animal minds work, including human minds. Without a closer look at these facets, it is difficult to make a reasonable comparison of communication systems between different species in the biological classification group Animalia, which takes in birds, fish, mammals, insects, and so on. I have touched on these issues in earlier chapters on reason and freedom, but this needs to be more explicit in this chapter, since knowing the fine-tuning of the way human minds work is necessary to understand their particular requirements for human communication and what might be considered highly distinctive facets of human language. Furthermore, symbolic and language development contributes not just to communication as such, but arguably to thinking itself. I will also give some specific examples of animal communication systems to illustrate the sheer variety in different species. As an intermediary between animal communication and the full-blown development of complex human language, I will discuss symbol making in early hominids and the possible reasons for its evolutionary development...
eBook - ePub- Nicky Hayes(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Psychology Press(Publisher)
...Studies of self-concept in apes show that they seem to be able to recognise themselves, and to realise when they are not looking the same as usual. ● Experiments involving teaching animals human languages have taken three forms: those attempting to teach vocal skills, which have generally been unsuccessful; those teaching specialised symbolic languages constructed for research purposes; and studies teaching sign language to apes. ● Whether animals can really learn to use language is a deeply controversial topic, but the application of language criteria developed before the debate began suggests that animals have successfully achieved a great deal in this field. ● One of the more useful ways of conceptualising behavioural diversity in comparative psychology may be in terms of the interaction between genetic and learned influences on behaviour, and the role of genetic preparedness for some kinds of learning to take place, rather than others....
eBook - ePubQuestions About Language
What Everyone Should Know About Language in the 21st Century
- Laurie Bauer, Andreea S. Calude, Laurie Bauer, Andreea S. Calude(Authors)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...That made for a series of good stories, but the scientific issue of the relation between animal and human “languages” remains (see Anderson [2004] for discussion). The current chapter, then, approaches the matter by attempting to outline the central properties of specifically human language, asking how known animal communication systems line up in this regard. Some essential properties of human language Over the years, numerous efforts have been made to characterize human language in its relation to the communication systems of other organisms, and to identify important differences. Undoubtedly, the best known in this regard is the effort of Charles Hockett to identify the “Design Features” of human language, a framework that evolved somewhat over time and whose last formulation is in Hockett (1960). This effort, however, like many that preceded it, suffers somewhat from its purely external and descriptive nature: that is, Hockett tries to identify the character of communicative systems (including language) in terms of their communicative function. In contrast, the focus of the present chapter is on the cognitive capacities that underlie the possibilities of communication, a perspective that provides a somewhat more categorical delineation of human language as opposed to other systems, while also drawing out some previously under-emphasized parallels. We can take as a starting point a widely noted feature of human language that seems to provide a unique strength, its richness and flexibility of expression: the essentially unbounded range of things that sentences in a language can express, including the ability to refer to things and situations arbitrarily distant from the speech situation in time and space, to things and situations that may not or do not exist, to logical relations between states of affairs as well as to those states themselves, etc...
eBook - ePub- John C. Eccles(Author)
- 2005(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Chapter four Linguistic communication in hominid evolution Before discussing the key role of language in hominid evolution, it is essential to consider philosophically the nature and structure of language, both of human language and of the communications practised by the higher mammals. The pongids provide our best model for such communications as they would have existed in our hominoid ancestors. 4.1 The levels of language The most comprehensive scope of all that can be subsumed in the category of language is that formulated by Buhler (1934) and further developed by Popper (1972, Chapter 6; and Popper and Eccles, 1977, Chapter P3). It is important that animal languages are considered along with human languages. Usually in a language there is a sender, a means of communication, and a receiver. It is a special kind of semiotic system. Figure 4.1 The four levels of human language, with the associated values as formulated by Popper. Levels 3 and 4 are exclusively human. In the Buhler-Popper classification (Figure 4.1) there are two lower forms of language (1 and 2) that animal and human languages have in common and two higher forms that may be uniquely human, though this is contested, as we shall see later. Meanwhile it can be agreed that the two lower forms of languages are: The expressive or symptomatic function: the animal is expressing its inner states of emotion or feeling, as also is done by human beings with calls, cries, laughter, etc. The releasing or signalling function: the ‘sender’ by some communication of its symptomatic expression attempts to bring about some reaction in the ‘receiver’. For example, the alarm call of a bird signals danger to the flock. Ethological studies have revealed an enormous variety of these signals, particularly in the social animals such as the primates...
