Aleksandra Skupień

M.A extramural studies

1st year

ANIMALS AND HUMAN LANGUAGE

Properties of human language

• Communicative signals
• Informative signals
• Unintentional signals e.g. sneezing-cold, strange accent – being from the other
country
• Intentional signals- e.g. producing some kind of utterance

! Animals are similar to humans – they sent some unintentional signals by being, for example,
feathered in some specified way and intentional ones by e.g. squeaking loudly.

1. Displacement - the property of human language namely the ability of referring to

past and future time. This skill enables us to speak about things and places whose
existence we can’t even be sure of e.g. angles, God, heaven, hell).

! Animals differ from humans – they are generally unable to relate to events that are far
removed in time and place; seem to communicate about the events that happen here and now
– exception : a worker bee- it has a property of displacement but to very limited degree.

2. Arbitrariness – the aspect of the relationship between linguistic signs and objects in
the world – it is hard to imagine the object when we hear the word- some
onomatopoeic words show this relativity e.g. crash, cuckoo, whirr, slurp (but these are
rare in human language).

! Animals- the majority of animal signals show clear connection between the conveyed
message and the signal used to convey it. That is because the number of signals used by
animals is finite e.g. many of those forms are used in specific situations like establishing
territory and at particular times (mating seasons).

3. Productivity – the ability of continual creation of novel utterances and new

expressions to describe new objects and situations; potential number of utterances in
any human language is infinite.

! Animals – are not so flexible: cicadas have only 4 signals to choose from; vervet monkeys-
36 vocal chords. It is not possible for them to produce new signals to communicate novel
experiences or events. Bees can only relate to each other in a horizontal distance – their
communication doesn’t work in vertical distance (limiting feature of animal communication).
It is called fixed reference. Each signal in the system is fixed as relating to particular object or
occasion.

4. Cultural transmission
– people don’t inherit their language by genes
 - the culture that we were born in stimulates the ability of speaking the exact
language
- we are born with predisposition to speak any language but the ability to use the
particular one is connected with the cultural environment

! Animals – produce their signals instinctively e.g. birds that grow alone produce some kind
of songs with abnormal for their species tune. A human infant that grows in isolation won’t
produce any instinctive language.

5. Duality

Human language is organized at two levels simultaneously:

• Physical level of sounds
• Level of meaning
This is one of the most economical features of the human language – with a limited set of
discrete sounds we are capable of producing a very large number of sound combinations (e.g.
words) which are distinct in meaning.(animals can’t do it).

Talking to animals

Animals probably associate a particular noise or a sound stimulus with an exact command. It
seems unlikely for them to understand the human language.

Chimpanzees and language

There were attempts to teach chimpanzees speak human language:

• 1930s- two scientists, Luella and Winthrop Kellog, raised a chimpanzee together with
their baby son. Gua was reported to be able to understand about a hundred words but
did not ‘say’ any of them.

• 1940s- Catharine and Keith Heyes raised Viki as their own human child. The
scientists tried to shape Viki’s lips in a particular way to make her say English words.
After 5 years of attempts she managed to say some, mainly poorly articulated versions
of mama, papa and cup. It was remarkable considering that non-human primates have
a physically structured vocal tract which is not suitable for articulating the sounds used
in speech.

• Washoe- Beatrix and Allen Gardner set out to teach a human chimpanzee to use a
version of American Sign Language. A chimpanzee was raised in a domestic
environment. She was constantly encouraged to use sign language even incomplete
baby-signs versions. In 3,5 years she was able to use 100 words ranging from airplane,
baby and banana to window, woman and you. She could also create simple sentences
and words, which would inquire the potential of productivity. She demonstrated the
understanding of much larger number of sings than she produced. She could lead
rudimentary conversations, mainly in form of question-answer sequences.

• Sarah and Lana- Ann and David Premack taught another chimpanzee Sarah to use
plastic shapes for the purpose of communicating with humans. These shapes
 represented words that could be arranged in sequence to built sentences. She remained
in cage and could build simple as well as complex sentences.

Duane Rumbaugh – trained Lana the specified language called Yerkish – consisted
of a set of symbols on a large keyboard linked to a computer.

There is a lot of skepticism concerning the linguistic skills of those two chimpanzees. It
has been pointed out that e.g. when Lana picked a symbol please she may not be aware of
its meaning- it was the same symbol that she saw on a button of a vending machine, so she
could learn how to use the machine without understanding the symbols.

• Nim – on the basis of his work with this chimpanzee, the psychologist Herbert Terrace
has argued that chimpanzees produce signs in response to the demands of people and
tend to repeat the signs those people use

• Kanzi – Sue Savage-Rumbaugh- the most recent study- this scientist tried to learn a
bonobo Yerkish language. Although Matata (that was her name) did not very well, her
adopted baby Kanzi (who was always by his mother) managed to use symbols
spontaneously with great ease. He had learned those by being exposed to and by
observation and learned a large spectrum of symbol vocabulary (about 250 words).
Moreover he was using gentle noises to refer to things such as bananas, grapes and
juice and symbols to ask for his favourite movies “Quest for fire” and “Greystoke”.

The barest rudiments of language

Although we are able to describe some key properties of language, it is difficult for us to
define what can be called “the usage of language”. We assume that when young human
children make language-like noises we are witnessing language development, but when young
chimpanzees produce language-like signs in interaction with humans, many scientists are very
unwilling to classify this as language-use. On the other hand chimpanzees cope with the
barest rudiments of language.

References:

Yule, George The Study of Language. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.Print