Language and Communication

Question 1

What is Language?

Answer 1

• A human only ability

- the individual productions of animals are merely signals - not words like humans are

Question 2

Discuss language and continuity across species

Answer 2

• There may be nothing special about human intelligence
• our brains are made up of more or less of same parts as other mammalian brains but we have much more cortex and relatively big frontal lobes
• if human and animal communication are equivalent in some respect, then we should be able to speak other animals’ languages or they should be able to speak ours

Question 3

Who is Gable and what study was he in?

Answer 3

Talking with animals:

• Gable (a dog) in action
• Emile’s work (Van der Zee, Zulch and Milss, 2012) showed that Gable’s ability to learn roughly the same number of words for objects as a child wasn’t the same as human children
• children group new words by shape (Landau, Smith and Jones, 1988)

Question 4

Who is Rico and what study was he in?

Answer 4

• The first ‘fast mapping’ dog
• anecdotally we seem to be able to interact with other animals
• animals seem to understand at least some aspect of human communication
• Rico lived as a pet dog and was 10 year old when the 2004 paper was published
• Rico appeared to know names of 200 objects in his environment (dog toys)
• this was tested in a lab study in which 20 groups of 10 items were created and Rico was required by his owner (who was in a different room) to fetch 2 of those items (1 after the other)
• Rico responded correctly on 37/40 trials
• Rico was able to correctly identify novel object that he’d never seen before (he ‘knew’ the ‘names’ of the familiar object(s) and fast-mapped the new objects onto the unfamiliar object

Question 5

What is Discontinuity?

Answer 5

Human language is qualitatively different from animal communication:

• Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch, (2002):
• arguing that human language involves something different from all other forms of animal’s communication
• humans have evolved from animals and we share some of their communicative abilities but humans have an additional cognitive ability that differentiates language from communication

Question 6

What is communication?

Answer 6

• Normally defined as the transfer of information
• one of the best known models is the ‘message model’ of Shannon and Weaver (1949)
• Definitions of communication that just involve transfer of information may be too broad
• many definitions narrow communication by adding 1 more of the conditions opposite:
  1. the communication must be intentional
  2. the communication must be between members of the same species (Diebold, 1968 etc.)
  3. the behaviour of 1 individual affects the behaviour of others (Altmann, 1962)

Question 7

What are the problems with the definitions of communication?

Answer 7

• The peacock’s tail display is intended to communicate his fitness as a mate
• if the peahen doesn’t choose him then has he communicated?
• some communication is intended specifically for other species e.g the colouration of the yellow jack hornet

Question 8

What are the functions of communication?

Answer 8

• Communication results in the sharing of information that allows others to make predictions about what behaviours are likely to occur (Cullen, 1996; Smith, 1977)
• e.g. if a male orb spider doesn’t communicate that he is the same species, he may as well end up as lunch (Bristowe, 1958)

Question 9

What are the types of communication?

Answer 9

• Emotional displays
• mating displays and mating related communication
• parent-offspring communication

Question 10

Discuss communication in social socies

Answer 10

• Because social species exist in groups, their communicative needs are more complex than solitary animals
• signals of dominance and alarm calls/distress calls are common

Question 11

What are the advantages of communication?

Answer 11

• Allows us to benefit from the actions and sensory apparatus of other members of our species
• the use of alarm calls allows individual meerkats to benefit from having extra pair eyes
• by using aggressive displays animals avoid actual physical conflict which might result in injury/death
• allows animals to access the cognitive states/knowledge of other members of their species

Question 12

Do bees have their own language?

Answer 12

‘The Round Dance’:

• Used when food sources are near the hive
• a returning scout (bee) runs clockwise and anti-clockwise circles, changing every 2 rotations
• this dance recruits workers to forage for the food source
• hypothesised that the quality of the food source is indicated by the length of the dance (Michener, 1974)

‘The Waggle Dance’:

1. This dance serves to recruit via sound (Wenner, 1962)
   - other foragers signal the distance and direction of food sources far from the hive (Michenner, 1992)
   - dance is a figure of 8 with a central straight section
   - the direction of the food source is communicated by the amount that the straight section of the dance differs from the location of the sun
   - the duration of the dance is thought to signal the distance (Michener et al., 1992)

Question 13

What are the Vervet Monkey alarm calls?

Answer 13

• Are the alarm calls of Vervet Monkeys sophisticated enough to be called language?
• (Vervet Snake Chutter)
• is the ‘snake chutter’/’leopard cough’ a word?
• The alarm calls by Vervet Monkeys carry meaning
• the calls produce predictable patterns of behaviour in monkeys hearing the calls:
• monkeys hearing the ‘snake chutter’ rear up on their hind legs and ‘mob’ a pyhton
• monkeys hearing the ‘leopard cough’ alarm call, run up tress to the ends of the branches
• monkeys hearing the eagle alarm call run and hide under bushes

Question 14

What are Hockett’s (1960) 6 design features of speech?

Answer 14

1. Semanticity
2. Arbitrariness
3. Discreteness
4. Duality of Patterning
5. Productivity
6. Displacement

Question 15

Do the communication systems of dolphins satisfy Hockett’s criteria?

Answer 15

• Bottle-nosed dolphins have characteristic ‘signature whistles’ that are mostly unique (arbitrariness, semanticity, productive?)
• male dolphins signatures differ a little from their mothers - Tyack, (1997) suggests this is because they leave their mother’s pods after adolescence

Question 16

Do the communication systems if bees satisfy Hockett’s criteria?

Answer 16

• The dances of bees display aspects of semanticity, displacement, displacement and potentially traditional transmission (but no productivity or duality of patterning)
• arbitrariness is questionable as there is a direct iconic match between the angle of the central portion and the sun in the waggle dance

Question 17

Do the communication systems of vervet monkeys satisfy Hockett’s criteria?

Answer 17

Cheney and Seyfarth, (1988):

• Tested whether or not the alarm calls of vervet monkeys were separate from the predators they referred to (arbitrariness, semanticity)
• they played recorded alarm calls from hidden speakers
• the monkeys reacted similarly to both fake(d) and actual alarm calls

There is evidence monkeys learn these alarm calls from their peers:

• The number of errors decreases when comparing the number of adult false calls with infants and adolescents (Seyfarth, Cheney and Marler, 1980)
• traditional transmission?
• there is no evidence for productivity or displacement

Question 18

Can animals learn a language?

Answer 18

• Animals may have the capability to learn a language but there’s been no evolutionary pressure on them to do so
• if animals could learn language, this would support the continuity of notion of communication
• this would suggest language is a ‘side effect’ of some other uniquely human features (like our intelligence)

Question 19

Explain Herman, Richards & Wolz, (1984) dolphin language study?

Answer 19

• Trained a bottle-nosed dolphin to respond to artificial language based on gestures
• the dolphin learned 50 signs
• although a very restricted set, the language had a strict word order
• the dolphin could successfully (85% of the time) carry out relatively complex commands that involved objects not in the dolphin’s immediate vicinity

Question 20

Suggest/explain some Ape language studies

Answer 20

• Early studies attempting to teach apes to speak failed e.g. (Kellog and Kellog, 1933)
• apes don’t have a vocal tract capable of allowing them to produce speech (Liebermann, 1991)
• because of the failure to teach apes to speak, researchers turned to American Sign Language
• one of the most famous attempts was Project Washoe (Gardner and Gardner, 1969)

Question 21

What is Project Washoe?

Answer 21

• Washoe = a chimp
• Gardner and Gardner raised a wild born infant chimp in a similar manner to that of a human child
• Washoe was surrounded by graduate students and researchers who signed to her and one another
• Washoe mastered over 100 signs

Question 22

Did Washoe learn ASL?

Answer 22

• +ve: Washoe demonstrated semnaticity
• +ve: she used 2 and 3 sign ‘sentences’
• +ve: she ‘taught’ an infant chimp to use signs
• +VE: she used signs for water and bird to name a swan (she didn’t know the sign for swan) - productivity
• -ve: Washoe didn’t grasp that language has a fixed word order. She wouldn’t reliably use ‘gimme tickle’ over ‘tickle gimme’
• -ve: in the swan example(s), maybe Washoe was just signing what she saw: a bird on some water - not productivity at all

Question 23

Who is Nim Chimpsky?

Answer 23

Terrace, (1979); Terrace, Pettito, Sanders and Bever, (1980):

• Studied a chimp call Nim
• Nim Chimsky was reared in a variety of environments before working with Terrace who used Nim in a similar environment to that experienced by Washoe
• Terrace found evidence on detailed examination of a video tape that Nim’s sign production was being inadvertently ‘led’ by his handlers

Question 24

Who is was Clever Hans?

Answer 24

• We must be cautious about attributing human characteristics to animals
• Clever Hans was a horse seemingly able to carry out a number of complex cognitive tasks e.g. reading, arithmetic and problems involving musical harmony

Question 25

What was Project Sarah?

Answer 25

• Premack trained Sarah in a less naturalistic and more experimental setting
• Sarah communicated via a ‘written language’ of plastic shapes
• she was able to understand conditions
• e.g. if ‘apple then chocolate’ - a finding that supports the idea that she could handle displacement