ANIMALS AND HUMAN LANGUAGE

1. ANIMALS AND HUMAN LANGUAGE

2. COMMUNICATION
 Communication is simply the act of transferring information from one place, person or group to another.
 For communication to happen there should be someone to send and another person to receive a particular message. The
sender, as well as the receiver, has to interpret the message to extract its meaning. Messages are conveyed back and forth
through feedback. Feedback can be through words or through non-verbal actions like various gestures, sighing, looking away or
nodding.
 Other factors are considered when communicating. The sender or the receiver of the message has to consider the message’s
context, where the message is given and the possible intervention when the message is sent or received.
 Situations are different if a person can see or hear the sender of the message because the receiver can immediately hear the
response or see the reactions to the message through emotions, emphasis or tone of voice of the sender.
 In written communication, consideration is given on how the specific characteristics of the text interact with the cognitive
facility of the reader to receive the information comprehensively and coherently. Likewise, the interaction of the language
with a person’s motivation and emotional makeup to persuade or move the reader should be looked into.
 Communication is a complex process and involves several variables like situations, different genre, medium and method of
delivery. Language, on the other hand, is affected by personal, cultural, institution and organizational aims.
 For linguists, it is essential to know how the use of language is affected by social context and how culturally diverse people
communicate.

3. PROPERTIES OF HUMAN LANGUAGE
 Human language is distinct from all other known animal forms of
communication in being compositional. Human language allows speakers to
express thoughts in sentences comprising subjects, verbs and objects—such as
‘I kicked the ball’—and recognizing past, present and future tenses.
Compositionality gives human language an endless capacity for generating
new sentences as speakers combine and recombine sets of words into their
subject, verb and object roles. For instance, with just 25 different words for
each role, it is already possible to generate over 15,000 distinct sentences.
Human language is also referential, meaning speakers use it to exchange
specific information with each other about people or objects and their
locations or actions.

4. PROPERTIES OF HUMAN LANGUAGE
 1- Reflexivity
 • Reflexivity is the property that enables humans to use language to think and
talk about
 language itself and does not appear to be present in any other creature’s
communication
 system. I went to the bank.

5. PROPERTIES OF HUMAN LANGUAGE
 2- Displacement
 • It allows language users to talk about things and events not present in the
immediate environment. It allows us to talk about things and places (e.g.
angels, fairies, Santa Claus, Superman, heaven, hell) whose existence we
cannot even be sure of.
 • Is it true that bee communication may have the property of displacement?
Example: the tail-wagging dance. What is the limitation of such a kind of
communication?

6. PROPERTIES OF HUMAN LANGUAGE
 3- Arbitrariness
 • There is no ‘natural’ connection between a linguistic form and its meaning.
For example, there is no actual relation between the word ‘bread’ and its
meaning.
 • In the majority of animal signals, there does appear to be a clear
connection between the conveyed message and the signal used to convey it.
This impression we have of the non-arbitrariness of animal signaling may be
closely connected to the fact that, for any animal, the set of signals used in
communication is finite.


7. PROPERTIES OF HUMAN LANGUAGE
 4- Productivity
 • Humans are continually creating new expressions and novel utterances by
manipulating their linguistic resources to describe new objects and situations.
 • Productivity = creativity = open-endedness.
 • Cicadas /sɪˈkɑːdə/ have four signals to choose from

8. PROPERTIES OF HUMAN LANGUAGE
 5- Cultural Transmission
 • The process whereby a language is passed on from one generation to the
next is described as cultural transmission. We acquire language in a culture
with other speakers.
 • Human is born with some kind of predisposition to acquire a language but (a
culture ) is needed to activate this ability.

9. PROPERTIES OF HUMAN LANGUAGE
 6- Duality
 • Language is organized at two levels: or layers:
 a Physical level: It is the ability to produce individual sounds.
 / b, d, a/. b Meaning level: It refers to the ability to combine the individual
sounds into meaningful unit. Bad-dad-ad-abd.-etc.

10. TALKING TO ANIMALS
 Human Language has some properties that make it different from animal
communication system. Animals cannot understand human language, so it is
less likely they can produce human language. Gua, a chimp’s baby is raised
with a human baby. He could understand 100 words but did not say any of
them.
 Viki is another chimps raised by a scientist couple. He has been trained for 5
years by trying to shape his mouth to produce sounds. Viki managed to
produce some poorly articulated words.

11. CHIMPANZEES AND LANGUAGE
 Chimpanzees are 98.76% genetically identical to us. With this genetic
closeness comes similarities and differences. One difference is that
chimpanzees are not able to speak vocally. Attempts were made to teach
chimpanzees a spoken language; which were largely unsuccessful. One
example of a study that had limited success is one that involved a
chimpanzee named Vicki. She was raised by human psychologists Keith and
Cathy Hayes in the 1950s. She acquired a limited vocal vocabulary of four
words: mama, papa, cup, and up. These words were hard to understand with
her heavy chimpanzee accent and and were largely voiceless. It has also been
found that chimpanzees have a relatively thin tongue and a higher larynx;
these physical attributes make vowel pronunciation difficult.

12. CHIMPANZEES AND LANGUAGE
 Many chimpanzee vocalizations are emotional. Just as a human would respond
when someone steps on their toe, so too do chimpanzees. When a person
steps on your toe, you don't think to yourself "hmm, my toe is being stepped
on. That hurts. I should yell," it's much more automatic than that: you yell!
Chimpanzee and human involuntary vocalizations are controlled by the limbic
system in the brain. Chimpanzees may food bark when they see food they
really like or alarm call when they are scared. Another reason that it is
unlikely for a chimpanzee to learn a vocal language is that chimpanzees tend
to be very quiet. Many people have reported passing a tree in the jungle and
later realizing that it was filled with chimpanzees silently grooming or eating!

13. CHIMPANZEES AND LANGUAGE
 In the 1920s Robert Yerkes (a pioneer of chimpanzee behavioral research)
recognized that, though chimpanzees could understand what he said, they
never imitated his sounds. He found that they would reproduce the actions
that they saw, but not what they heard from humans. Researchers of free-
living chimpanzees have also found that chimpanzees communicate often
with gestures. When requesting to groom, they may raise an arm over head.
Mothers may make a scooping gesture with their arm behind their back when
it is time for their baby to climb on their back to leave. With these and other
observations, the use of sign language seemed to compliment the nature of
chimpanzees. The chimpanzees have acquired many signs, they have even
made signs of their own to communicate with their human companions.
Chimpanzees who communicate through sign language have also creatively
combined signs to identify things, for example: BIRD-MEAT (turkey), NUT-
BERRY-PAPER (fruit leather), WATER-BIRD (swan), and CRY-HURT-FOOD
(radish)

14. CHIMPANZEES AND LANGUAGE
 Just like there are different accents in the United States (depending on where
you live) there are also accents among chimpanzees. Not only do chimpanzees
and humans have different accents, but also different words can be used for
the same thing. Humans from different areas of the United States understand
that "soda," "pop," and "coke" mean the same thing. Chimpanzees have
different accents as well as different uses of words. Chimpanzees sign BIRD in
the inverted form (fingers pinching lips) much like young children. Washoe
signs FRUIT for apple (more generic). The ASL sign CHASE does not make
contact, however, the chimpanzees have turned it into a contact sign by
hitting the fist on the wrist.