Animal Communication, Part 1 Flashcards
(19 cards)
Case Study: Clever Hans
Researchers believed that the reason horses and other animals seemed to be less intelligent than humans was mainly due to lack of educational opportunities
Took the horse, Hans, and taught him how to tell time, keep track of the calendar, read and spell German, do basic math, respond correctly tot verbal or written questions
Hans would tap out the answer or shake his head a number of times that correspond to the right answer
What did Oskar Pfungst discover in the case of Clever Hans?
Under certain circumstance Hans did much worse in getting to the answer; when he was isolated from an audience or had blinders on or when questioner didn’t know the answer
Found that Hans started tapping when people made slight movements in anticipation of the answer. Hans picked up on these subconsciously and was just responding to the reactions of the owner and the audience.
Case study: Alex the parrot
Effectively trained the parrot to answer quaestions, make commands, label objects etc.
Pepperberg taught Alex the “meaningful use of English speech” - not the language itself
Properties of human language (9)
To be like human language, animals would have to possess these characteristics
- Interchangeability
- Cultural transmission
- Arbitrariness
- Duality of patterning
- Displacement
- Prevarication
- Ambiguity
- Productivity
- Grammar
Interchangeability
a user can transmit and receive messages
*should be possible by both males and females.
Not all animals display this. Sometimes onlt males or only females can communicate.
Cultural Transmission
language is elarned through both a nature (innate) componeent and a nurture component (learned)
Animal communication systems vary on how much nature or nurture influence communication systems. For some it is fully nature or fully nurutre and for other it is a combination.
Other species have a critical period
Explain the critical period for the white round sparrow
- 75-80 days: produce a “plastic song” known as the subsong (it is distinct from the adult song and consists of unstructured sounds)
- 90 days: crystallization - the song is fixed
- 240 days: full sound aquired
Suggests a combination of innateness AND learning
Critical period for the song sparrow
Has a critical period of 20-70 days
- Birds only exposed from days 3-7 will produce abnormal song
- Birds only exposed from days 50-71: some deterioration in adult song since exposure is late in critical period
- Bird only exposed after 300 days: only subsong produced and not recognizable as characteristic of the species
- Bird only exposed from days 35-56: normal song development
Arbitrariness
No natural or necessary connection between linguistic form and its meaning
Duality of patterning
communication system is decomposable into smaller, recognizable parts
smaller units recombine into larger units at two levels:
1. Sounds form words
2. Words form sentences
Doesn’t seem to be found in most animal communication systems
The meaningful elements are not decomposable into smaller units
Did Alex the parrot exhibit duality of patterning?
No, aside from a few fixed phrases, Alex did learn some fixed phrases but these were not recombined
Displacement
able tot alke about things int he past, present, and future as well as abstract concepts
Most animal communication systems lack this property, however, not always
What language characteristic does the Frisch study examine?
displacement
Frisch study
Studied the use of displacement in bees; which do a dance for a specific duration and a specific angle to cimmunicate where to go, how far to fly, and what distance to go
- Had two different feeder locations
- Bees at each location were marked with a spot of paint so they could be tracked when they returned to the hive
- Both sets of bees performed the figure eight dance but depending on which food source they same from, the danced in a different direction
Three types of dances bees perform to communicate food sources
Round dance = relatively close
Sickle dance = intermediate distance
Tail wagging dance = relatively far
Prevarication
language can describe things that are imaginary (we can use language to lie)
-requires theory of mind
-largely absent in animals
Ambiguity
Words in human language can have several different meanings but not the case with animals
Productivity
ability to epxress an unlimited number of novel ideas
not present in animals: limited sets of signals to chose from - fixed reference
They cannot produce any new signals to describe novel experiences
Grammar
Human languages have modules of grammar (phonetics, phonology, morphology, and syntax)
If any of these are found in animal communication systems, they exist inly in very rudimentary forms
