Animal and Human Language

Animal and Human Language

Comunication

In communication, there are communicative signals, which are those we intentionally send to others to inform or communicate something. There are also informative signals, which are those we send involuntarily, for example, if we sneeze or blow our nose, others may know that we have a cold. this is important and needs to be taken into account when talking about the differences between human language and animal communication.

Properties of Human Language

Arbitrariness

Displacement

Reflexivity

Productivity

Cultural Transmision

Duality

Talking to Animals

With all these properties, it is almost impossible for animals to be able to understand human language. Sometimes we can give commands to our pets, and they may respond with an action but that does not mean that they understand what we say, they simply react with a behavior in response to a sound stimulus. With this being said, it would be even more dificult for animals to produce human language.

Chimpanzees and Language

Over the years, various experiments have been conducted to try to teach human language to chimpanzees, but they have not been very successful. In the 1930s, Luella and Kellogg, two scientists, raised a chimpanzee with their own child. The chimp was able to understand some words, but not to produce them. Also, in the 1940s, another pair of scientists spent 5 years raising another chimpanzee in their own home as if it were a human child, yet the chimpanzee could barely make some sounds similar to "mama, dada and cup".

Washoe was a different chimpanzee who learned to use a version of American Sign Language because the scientists who were raising her used it when they were around her. Within three and a half years, she was able to use over a hundred words. At the same time, Sarah, another chimpanzee was being trained to use plastic shapes to communicate. The shapes represented words and could be rearranged to create sentences. Simultaneously, Lana, another chimpanzee, was also trained with the same technique by different scientists. Both Sarah and Lana were able to ask for things using the shapes.

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Bibliography

Displacement

We can use language to talk about anything we want. We can talk about our past, present, or future. We can also use language to talk about things that may not exist, and things that can only exist in our mind. On the other hand, animals can communicate through sounds, but not in the same way. For example, your cat may meow to express that it’s hungry, but it’s communicating something of the moment.

Reflexivity

It refers to the fact that humans are able to use language to talk about itself. For example, we are able to talk about the words, the structure, rules, and how the language works, using the language itself.

Arbitrariness

It refers to the fact that language has no connection between how we write a word and its meaning. For example, the word "cat", we cannot know its meaning just by looking at its linguistic form, because the spelling does not have the shape of a car, and the pronunciation of the word itself does not resemble one either.

Cultural transmission

This property refers to how language is transmitted from one generation to the next, and that we learn a language based on the surrounding culture and not on parental genes. For example, a cat will always meow, a dog will always bark, but when we talk about humans and language it is not the same. If an Italian couple comes to El Salvador and they have a baby, it is more likely that the child will speak Spanish because it is the language that surrounds it. The child can also speak Italian if the parents teach it, but the fact that the child has Italian genes does not mean that it will automatically speak the language, the child must learn it.

Productivity

We could say that a language is always changing, because people are always creating new utterances, new expressions by combining existing words, etc. so, this is why we say language is productive. This is a huge difference from animal communication, because animals cannot create new expressions or new utterances.

It refers to the fact that we can reuse and combine different sounds and letters to create other words with different meanings, so it is not necessary to have specific sounds or letters for each word. For example, we can use the letters of the word "listen" to create the word "silent". It even has a similar sound at the end.

Duality