Animal Communication Systems

Question 1

Types of animal communication (insects, monkeys, whales/dolphins)

Answer 1

• Insects: communicate with pheromones
• Monkeys: good range of what they can communicate but still overall limited; restricted to present moment
• Whales/Dolphins: highly social and use tools to teach their young, but no evidence of planning/reasoning

Question 2

Language in chimps

Answer 2

• Historical attempts to teach language, common assumption that chimps have the same language capacity as us
• Case studies: sign language, sensitivity to word order, present focused, no syntactic structure, responded through repetition

Question 3

Differences between human and ape speech

Answer 3

• Humans: universal acquisition, experimental, grammar evolves, use words to express intention
• Apes: variable acquisition, copying, slower and more effortful, use language as tool to get things, interrupt a lot

Question 4

Bird song learning

Answer 4

• Imitation of adult vocalizations during sensitive period (similar to babbling in toddlers)
• FOXP2 gene involved –> songbirds have brain regions analogous to human speech and language cortices (left hemisphere dominance)
• Has phonological syntax, but no semantics
• Limited meanings and intentions, lacks recursion

Question 5

Speech processing in animals

Answer 5

Categorical perception (cutting up a stream of speech into distinct phonemes) is observed in some animals, but animal phoneme boundaries are different; in contrast, human infants seem to be born perceiving phoneme boundaries

Question 6

Faculty of Language Narrow (FLN) vs. Faculty of Language Broad (FLB)

Answer 6

• FLN: aspects of language that are unique to humans (e.g. recursion)
• FLB: aspects of language that are not exclusive to human language and communication