Language in
Nonhumans
We have seen that language
learning is deeply rooted in the nature and development of human brains. Does
this imply that creatures with different sorts of brains will be unable to
learn language? As we will see, the evidence indicates that our nearest animal
relatives cannot come close to attaining human language, even with the best of
good will and the most strenuous educational procedures. At the same time,
though, there is considerable overlap between our biological endowments and
those of other primates. For this reason, we should not be too surprised if
some rudiments of language can be made to grow in them. If so, they may offer
insight into the origins of our own commu-nicative organization.
Recent studies do reveal
interesting commonalities between human and animal com-munication. For example,
vervet monkeys have separate calls of alarm, depending on the predator—leopard,
eagle, or snake, which are responded to differentially by other vervets (Cheney
& Seyfarth, 1990; also see Ghazanfar & Hauser, 1999; S. Green, 1975).
Related communicative uses have been demonstrated for dolphin whistles as well
(Reiss, McCowan, & Marino, 1997; Tyack, 2000). However, animals’ production
of sounds is very restricted, with a vocabulary size of only a few dozen
different signals, compared to the tens of thousands of words in an adult human’s
repertoire. And crucially for the com-parison with humans, the animal signals
do not combine together to enlarge the num-ber of messages that can be
conveyed. Humans link their words in ever new and structured ways so as to
express new thoughts that listeners easily comprehend. This cre-ative kind of
communication appears to be closed even to our closest primate cousins. For
instance, monkeys have no way to utter differentially “Beware! Monkeys-eating-snakes” versus “Beware!Snakes-eating-monkeys.”
On the other hand, animals’
perception of sounds (and comprehension of the mean-ing associated with the
sounds) is much more impressive than their restricted speaking (or signing).
Wild monkeys and apes live in groups that number into the hundreds, rec-ognize all
of these individuals’ calls, and learn the alarm calls of birds, impala, and
other animals. In captivity they learn to recognize the meaning of all sorts of
sounds, like the voices of different caretakers or the beep of a card swipe
that signals feeding time. And while monkeys and apes rarely produce
combinations of calls to convey new messages, they hear and interpret call
combinations all of the time, whenever two of their group-mates are interacting
with each other. For instance, in one experiment, baboons were played a
threatening grunt from Hannah, a low-ranking female in their group, paired with
a submissive scream from Sylvia, a high-ranking female. This seemed to violate
the existing dominance hierarchy and the listeners responded strongly as if startled
by the oddity. On the other hand, they showed little or no response when they
heard the threat-ening grunt from Sylvia and the submissive scream from Hannah
(Bergman, Beehner, Cheney, & Seyfarth, 2003). Thus, the baboons seem
insensitive to the syntax of other
baboon utterances, and this limits their communicative prowess. But, even so,
they do seem sensitive to the context
of the utterances, and, in particular, who is saying what to whom. This
context-sensitivity enormously enlarges the number of socially relevant
mes-sages that can be conveyed, making baboon communication richly informative
despite its limits of form and structure (Cheney & Seyfarth, 2007).
Is it possible that with just the
right training this limited repertoire of production can be overcome and
animals can master communication skills that truly deserve the term language? Many researchers have pursued
these possibilities, trying to teach language-like systems to animals in the
laboratory, using a variety of communication media in which hand gestures, bits
of colored plastic, or symbols on a computer screen stand for words.
Researchers have also tried to train a range of species, including chimpanzees,
dolphins, gorillas, dogs, parrots, and pygmy chimps (bonobos). These animals
have made impressive progress—increasing their gesture “vocabulary” (to roughly
500 “words” in the case of the bonobo Kanzi and close to 300 for the border
collie Rico; Figure 10.38; Kaminski, Call, & Fischer, 2004).
However, the results of these
training efforts have all been rather limited and so utterly fail to support
the extravagant descriptions of these “linguistic creatures” in the popular
media. Even after exten-sive training, their utterances are rarely more than
two words long; when longer, they tend to involve disorganized repetitions (Giveorange me give eat orange me eat orange
give me orange give me you). Their utterances aretypically imitations or
expansions of the utterance they just heard from their human trainers, and
their mastery of syntax is sharply limited. For example, no nonhuman has
mastered the distinction between plural and singular nouns, or verb tense, or
any means of marking words for their grammatical class, while every human child
of nor-mal mentality does so by the age of 3 or 4, without explicit training.
(For reviews, see Kako, 1999; Petitto, 1988; Pinker, 1994; Tomasello, 1994,
2003; for contrary views see also Herman & Uyeyama, 1999; Pepperberg, 1999;
Savage-Rumbaugh & Fields, 2000.)
The conclusion, then, is that
animals do indeed have rich communicative systems of their own, but these
systems are strikingly, qualitatively, different from human language.
Nonetheless, we can learn from animals in the wild—particularly monkeys and
apes— something about the ancestral communicative system from which language
may have emerged. If modern primates are any guide, our prelinguistic ancestors
had some calls that functioned like words (alarm calls, for example), and were
exceptionally skilled at recognizing others’ voices, distinguishing different
call types (screams, threats, and oth-ers) and extracting a huge number of
different messages from a limited vocabulary com-bined with their
interpretation of the situation at hand. Before language, there was a rich set
of meanings and concepts, all embedded in the animals’ socially grounded
knowledge of each other.
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