Animals and Human

Language
Creatures are capable of
communicating
 Signals

Informative
communicative
 Displacement
 Animals communicate about things in ‘here & now’ situation. e.g. we won’t
have any other responses from our cat, but meow for any question we give.
When the cat pronounce meow, it is last night, over the park, at the moment
of speaking, etc.
 Human communicate ‘yesterday’ things now as well as ‘now’ things
tomorrow
 Human can refer to past and future time, non-existing things, events, and
places
 Bee dancing?
 Arbitrariness
 Animal  Recognizable links between sound
signal and the message
 Human  No ‘natural’ links between sound signal
(form) and the message (meaning)
 Onomatopoeia  to echo the sounds, objects, or
activities
 Productivity
 Animals have LIMITED number of messages (why)
 Monkeys (36 vocal calls), Cicadas (4 signals)  fixed
reference
 Human have UNLIMITED number of codes and messages
(why)
 Human continually create new expression and manipulate
the linguistics resources
 Cultural Transmission
 Animal  knowing and sounding without learning (genetic)
 Human  need to learn to produce sounds  not from
parental genes  culturally transmitted trough exposure
 Korean-parent-infant adopted and brought up by English
speaker in US will be physically inherited from natural
parents but speaking English
 Duality
 Animal can use BASIC SOUND only ONCE
 The number of basic sounds influence the number of message
 Human language has a set of PHONEME that is meaningless in
ISOLATION (i, b, n) but meaningful in COMBINATION (bin, nib)
 Our language has TWO LAYERS
 More flexible and economical
The five properties make human
communication system so unique
that other creatures seem unable
to understand.

How about horse, dog, or circus

animals responding their masters’
spoken commands. Understanding?
Behavior?
 Gua
• 1930s, Luella & Winthrop Kellog
• Raising Gua together with their baby son
• Understand 100 words without saying it

Viki 1940s, Catherine & Keith Hayes

•
• 5 years of experiment getting Viki produce human sounds, mama, papa, cup

Washoe
• Beatrix & Allen Gardner
• Teaching Washoe ASL, age 3,5 years being able to use 100 words and some simple
sentences

Sarah & Lana •

•
Ann & David Premack teaching Sarah associating plastic shapes with objects or actions
Duane Rumbaugh teaching Lana through a set of symbols on keyboards connected to the computer

Kanzi Matata’s adopted baby, Kanzi, developed large number of

•
vocabularies by being exposed
 Lesson learned

o Washoe and Kanzi were able to perform symbol-based

interaction but failed to develop rapid and massive
linguistic development compared to human.

o Human is not objective in defining the nature of ‘using

language’.
 thanks!
Any questions?

This week, please proceed to the chapter of The Sound of a

Language, and study Place of Articulation