ANIMAL SYSTEMS OF COMMUNICATION

The characteristics that distinguish human language from animal language are
illuminated when it is compared with animal communication systems. Animals are
clearly able to communicate at some level with one another as well as with
humans. Cats meow and dogs bark for attention and are able to convey a variety
of messages by such things scratching at the door or looking expectantly at their
dishes
A. Bee Communication
Karl Von Frisch discovered Italian honeybee dances
1) The round dance indicates the source of nectar is within 20 feet of the hive;
intensity of movement indicates the richness of the source.
2) The sickle dance indicates the source of nectar is 20 to 60 feet from the hive;
again, the richness of the source is indicated by intensity of movement; the angle
with respect to gravity denotes the direction of the source in relation to the sun.
3. The tail-wagging dance is performed to indicate that the source of nectar is
beyond 60 feet from the hive (80 feet in the Austrian honeybee). It imparts all the
information of the sickle dance plus indicates the precise distance by the number
of repetitions per minutethe slower the repetition the farther distance.
B. Sea Mammals and Birds

Whales and dolphins have elaborate systems of whistles and grunts that
are clearly meaningful to other whales and dolphins.
Birds have two types of sound signals---calls and songs.

1. Bird calls consist of one or more short notes and seem to be instinctive
responses to danger, nesting, flocking and a few other basic situations. The
English sparrow has three flight callsone used just before takeoff, another
during flight, and one just before landing at a nesting site. Sparrows have two
types of danger calls, one to announce that a predator is nearbylike an owl in a
treeand the other to announce that a predator is soaring overhead. These calls
seem intended to coordinate group activity in specific situations. The meanings of
these signs constitute a small, finite set which cant be increased. And the bird
calls cannot be varied to provide variations of meaning.
2. Bird songs are used primarily by meals to attract mates or establish territory.
Bird songs are limited to these and only these functions. Although bird senses are
longer than bird calls, their internal elements arent separable into meaningful
units and cannot be rearranged to produce new songs.

Interestingly, although bird songs are inborn, and young birds naturally
begin producing them at a certain age even if raised away from their
species, the fledging bird must experience adult songs to reproduce the
song perfectly. If the fledging is deprived of this input it will grow up to
produce the song naturally anyway, but with marked imperfection.

C. Ape Communication
1) Limited to close-knit social groups
Among apes communication generally takes place within a single social
group composed members of both sexes and of disparate ages, who have spent
most or all of their lives together. Attempts at communication between complete
strangers are very rare.
2) Contains much gesturing, facial expressions
Primates, as a rule, have very good eyesight and much of their
communication is accomplished in gestures or body language. To show
dominance, primate has a relaxed posture and walks with a sort of swagger. The
timid primate by contrast is tense and walks with its back arched as if to spring
away at any moment.
3) Meaning of gestures is species-specific
The meaning of gestures differs from species to species, even slightly from
group to group among the same species. Monkeys use a grimace to signal
aggression and hostility, while chimpanzees bare their teeth as a form of greeting
or reassurance. One species of primates raised within community of another
species will come to comprehend the other primates signals but will only produce
the signals of its own species. This seems to indicate that primate communication
systems, like those of bees and birds, are largely instinctive rather than learned.
Studies that set out to teach Natural language to Chimpanzees
A) GUA
In 1931, Prof. and Mrs. M.N. Kellogg became the first American family to
raise chimpanzee and a child together (their son Donald)
No special effort was made to teach Gua to talk; like the human baby, she
was simply exposed to a speaking household.
Gua used her natural chimpanzee cry
Although Gua was rather better than Donald in most physical
accomplishments, unlike Donald she did not babble and did not learn to say
any English words.
B) VIKI
In the 1940s psychologists Catherine and Keith Hayes set out to improve
upon the Kelloggs experiment by raising a chimpanzee named Viki as if she
was their own child.
The Hayeses made every effort to teach Viki to talk; they had assumed that
chimpanzees were rather like retarded children and that love and patient
instruction would afford Viki the opportunity for optimal language
development.
After six years of training, Viki appeared to understand a great deal, but she
was able to produce only four words: mama, papa, cup and up. She was
never able to say more and the words she did say were very difficult to
understand in order to produce a and p, she had to hold her lips together
with her finger.

C) WASHOE
Drs. Beatrice and Allen Gardner at the University of Nevada in 1996 first
attempted to capitalize upon the ability of a chimpanzee by teaching her
human sign language.
The Gardners moved a young chimpanzee named Washoe. During the time
of the project, she learned over 130 human languages sings, as well as how
to combine them into utterances of several signs. She was able to sign,
Please tickle hug hurry, Gimme food drink.
She appeared to use her signs in a creative way: on seeing a duck for the
first time she signed water bird.
Since her utterances were typically answers to questions posed to her
(What is that?), it is not clear whether she was attempting to make a new
word. Unlike English speaking children, she did not pay attention to word
order, and at the time her training ceased it was not clear whether her sign
language was actually structures grammatically in the sense that even
young children.
However, through vocabulary tests of Washoe, as well as of subsequent
chimpanzee subjects named Moja, Pili, Tatu, Dar, the Gardners were able to
demonstrate a substantial overlap of childrens and chimpanzees first 50
words.
D) NIM CHIMPSKY
Prof. Herbert S. Terrace (1980) of Columbia University attempted to answer
the question whether chimpanzees can make grammatical sentences.
The plan was to raise Nim in a rich human environment, teach him ASL, and
then analyze, just as childrens language is analyzed, the chimps emerging
ability to combine signs into utterances, paying special attention to any
evidence that he could indeed produce grammatical signed sentences.
When he was four months, he produced his first sign drink. But his later
utterances never progressed much beyond the two-or-three-sign stage. He
signed, Eat Nim, and Banana me eat but when he made four-sign
utterances, he added no new information and, unlike even young children,
he used no particular word order. He signed, Banana me eat banana, in
which the additional word is merely repetitive.
Terrace concluded that there was no evidence that the chimp could produce
anything that might be called a sentence.
CONCLUSIONS
We can say that the signs of animal communication are more like inborn
and involuntary human reactions such as laughter, crying, and sneezing
than they are like human language. As far as we know humans have always
had laughter and tears as natural inborn responseschildren develop them
naturally and they dont change from generation to generation---although,
even here, humans can use these responses deliberately and creatively, or
suppress their naturally-felt urges to express them.
TEACHING ANIMALS CREATIVE LANGUAGE. Animals clearly do not have
creative communication which could be called true language. But can
animals be taught to use creative human-style languages? This question is
still debated by linguist and natural scientists---but the answer is probably
no.

Comparison of Human Language and Animal Communication

Similarity
All systems communication contain signs, units of form with specific meaning
(words). Human languages contain sound symbols called words: animal systems
use more carried formal media, but each form is assign conveying definite
meaning.
Six Key Differences
1) The signs of animal systems are inborn. Birds, apes and bees naturals and
instinctively develop their species signals, even if raised in captivity and away
from adults of their own species. Humans must acquire language through
exposure to a speech community (cf. example of chicken picking up obscenities
vs. a child getting a new tooth). A Korean child adopted and raised in America
wont spontaneously develop Korean words or sentences in an all-English
speaking environment or naturally develop a degraded form of Korean. The words
of human languages are definitely not inborn. Rather, it seems that it is the
capacity to acquire creative language which is innate to humans (linguist Noam
Chomsky calls this still mysterious capacity the LAD, or language acquisition
device). The actual form of any particular language is definitely not inborn and
must be acquired through prolonged exposure. No linguist disputes the fact that a
child of any ethnic origin can learn any language, exposure to a speech
community is all important: racial or ethnic origin in themselves are completely
unimportant.
2) Animal systems are set responses to stimuli. Animal communication is here
and now-used to express something more or less immediately present in space
and time. In other words the sign of animal communication are used as indexes.
As far as we know, animal cant communicate about yesterday, about what might
be or what wasnt. in this way animal communication system are unlike the
repertoire of sounds of a 12 month old infant, who has a way on conveying
interest in something immediately present, or conveying emotional responses
such as discontent, loneliness and a few other basic states of being.
Human language is not purely a reflex triggered automatically by external stimuli
or internal emotion states. Human language can be used as an index, just like
animal communication but it may also exhibit what has been termed

displacement. Humans can not only talk about thing that is absent but also about
thing that have never been. Humans can invent myths and tell lies. Human
language can be used arbitrarily, with the stimulus deep within the speakers
psyche and the topic not present or even non-existent. Animal language can only
be used as a means of pointing to something directly present in time and space.
3) In animal systems, each signal has one and only one function. More than one
sign cannot share the same meaning. For example, gorillas in the wild have three
types of signals which express dangers, presence of food, and desire for sex. The
gibbon system of communication consists of signal: a signal for danger on the
ground of danger in a tree, and another for danger in the air: these three do not
overlap in meaning and each meaning can only be expressed by that one sign.
In contrast the sign in human language usually have more than one meaning: and
each meaning can be expressed by more than one sign ( with the word eye)
4) Animal signal are not naturally used in novel ways. Animal systems are
essentially non-creative. They cannot be used metaphorically or figuratively. As
far as we know, animals cant lie or invent myths.
Human language is creative and can be used in novel ways. Two-year old children
can produce novel utterances they have never heard before (*sheeps, *Daddy
give the book). By three, children regularly produce sentences they have never
heard before and regularly use words in new, creative ways. Messages can be
sent that have never been heard before by the sender or by anyone else. Human
languages are definitely creative in that a potentially limitless number or
messages can be sent.
Unlike animals, human can lie, they can use language to distort or extend the
world around them. Animal communication is based on a limited inventory of
signs. If you learn the set of signals and their meaning then you know the system
completely; there is no creativity for extending it further. This is not the case with
human language. If you were to learn the entire set of words in any human
language, you would still not know the language.
5) Because they are non-creative, animal systems are closed inventories of signs
used to express a few specific messages only. Honeybees, for instance, can
communicate only about the location of a source of nectar. As far as we know,
bees do not communicate about the weather or the beauty of nature, of gossip
about other bees in the hive.
Human language is unlimited in this in its expressive capacity. Besides containing
word symbols, human language are based a system of patterns, or rules, called
grammar.
Grammar can be defined as patterns with function but no specifies meaning:
phonology (new sound combination), morphology (new words), and syntax (new
sentences). It is the grammar that allows language signs to be used with virtually
endless creatively.

Animal system is limited to a strictly defined, finite range of possible messages

there is never anything new because there is no abstract level similar to humans
grammar.
6) Because they are non-creative, animal system seem not to change from
generation to generation. Actually, they change extremely slowly, over periods of
many thousands of year, but as a result of genetic drift rather than conscious
innovation (compare the dialects of the American redwing blackbird and the
dialect of European honeybee)
Because it is a vehicle for creativity, human language is very changeable. Human
language