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8. Discreteness: messages in the system are made up of smaller, repeatable parts; the sounds of language (or cheremes of a sign) are perceived categorically, not continuously. 9. Displacement: linguistic messages may refer to things remote in time and space, or both, from the site of the communication. 10. Productivity: users can create and understand completely novel messages. 10.1. In a language, new messages are freely coined by blending, analogizing from, or transforming old ones. This says that every language has grammatical patterning. 10.2. In a language, either new or old elements are freely assigned new semantic loads by circumstances and context. This says that in every language new idioms constantly come into existence. 11. Cultural transmission: the conventions of a language are learned by interacting with more experienced users. [ We learn language from contact with competent language users, this explains why infants do not intrinsically know all languages]. 12. Duality (of Patterning): a large number of meaningful elements are made up of a conveniently small number of meaningless but message-differentiating elements. 13. Prevarication: linguistic messages can be false, deceptive, or meaningless.
14. Reflexiveness: In a language, one can communicate about communication. [We do this every week in GH Language]. 15. Learnability: A speaker of a language can learn another language. [Question: is this the same way infants learn language?] "There is...a sense in which [productivity], displacement, and duality [of patterning]...can be regarded as the crucial, or nuclear, or central properties of human language." [Question: So what exactly is it about us that makes us UNIQUE?]
Gibbon Gibbon Gibbons are the small apes in the family Hylobatidae. The family is divided into four genus based on their diploid chromosome number: Hylobates , Hoolock ,
Bees
Taken from the Department of Entomology: NY State University: http://www.cals.ncsu.edu/entomology/apiculture/Dance_language.html, 1/10/07 There can be no argument that the most famous aspect of honey bee biology is their method of recruitment, commonly known as the honey bee dance language. It has served as a model example of animal communication in biology courses at all levels, and is one of the most fascinating behaviors that can be observed in nature. The dance language is used by one individual to communicate two items of information to one ore more receivers: the distance and direction to a location (typically a food source, such as a patch of flowers). It is usually used when an experienced forager returns to her colony with a load of food, either nectar or pollen. If the quality of the food is sufficiently high, she will often perform a "dance" on the surface of the wax comb to recruit new foragers to the resource. The dance language is also used to recruit scout bees to a new nest site during the process of reproductive fission, or swarming. Recruits follow the dancing bee to obtain the information it contains, and then exit the hive to the location of interest. The distance and direction information contained in the dance are representations of the source's location and thus is the only known abstract "language" in nature other than human language.
The dance language is inextricably associated with Dr. Karl von Frisch, who is widely accredited with discovering its meaning. He and his students carefully described the different components of the language through decades of research. Their experiments typically used glass-walled observation hives, training marked foragers to artificial feeders placed at known distances from a colony, and carefully measuring the angle and duration of the dances when the foragers returned. His work eventually earned him the Nobel Prize (in Medicine) in 1973. The concept of a honey bee language, however, has not been free of scepticism. Several scientists have argued that simply because the dance exists does necessarily mean that it communicates information about the location of a food source. Those critics have argued that floral odours on a forager's body are the major cues that recruits use to locate novel food sources. Many experiments have directly tested this alternative hypothesis and demonstrated the importance of floral odours in food location. The biological reality, however, is somewhere in between these two extremes. The current conventional wisdom holds that recruits go to the area depicted in the dance, but then "home in" to the flower patch using odour cues. Indeed, researchers have built a robotic honey bee that is able to perform the dance language and recruit novice foragers to specific locations. The robot, however, is unable to properly recruit foragers to a food source unless there is some odour cue on its surface. Nevertheless, it is clear that honey bees use the distance and direction information communicated by the dance language, which represents one of the most intriguing examples of animal communication.
At its core, there are two things communicated in a dance: distance and direction. These two pieces of information are translated into separate components of the dance.
Distance
When a food source is very close to the hive (i.e., less than 50 meters away), a forager performs a round dance (see Figure). She does so by running around in narrow circles, suddenly reversing direction to her original course. She may repeat the dance several times at the same location or move to another location to repeat the dance. After the round dance has ended, she often distributes food to the bees following her. A round dance, therefore, communicates distance ("close to the hive"), but no direction.
Dance diagrams: from von Frisch, 1976 p. 70. Food sources that are at intermediate distances, between 50 and 150 meters away from the hive, are recruited to with the sickle dance. The form of this dance is crescent-shaped, a transitional dance between a round dance and a figure-eight waggle dance (see below). A waggle dance, or wag-tail dance, is performed by bees foraging at food sources that are over 150 meters away from the hive. This dance, unlike the round and sickle dances, communicates both distance and direction to potential recruits. A bee that performs a waggle dance runs straight ahead for a short distance, returns in a semicircle to the starting point, runs again through the straight course, then makes a
duration of the straight run portion of the dance, measured in seconds, is the simplest and most reliable indicator of distance. As the distance to the food source increases, the duration of the waggling portion of the dance (the "waggle run") also increases. The relationship is roughly linear, as shown in the figure. For example, a forager that performs a waggle run that lasts 2.5 seconds is recruiting for a food source located approximately 2625 meters away.
Direction
While the representation of distance in the waggle dance is relatively straightforward, the method of communicating direction is more complicated and abstract. The orientation of the dancing bee during the straight portion of her waggle dance indicates the location of the food source relative to the sun. The angle that the bee adpots, relative to vertical, represents the angle to the flowers relative to the direction of the sun outside of the hive. In other words, the dancing bee transposes the solar angle into the gravitational angle. The figure below gives three examples. A forager recruiting to a food source in the same direction as the sun will perform a dance with the waggle run portion
Direction figure: from Barth, F. G. 1982. Insects and Flowers: The Biology of a Partnership, p. 221, Princeton University Press Because the direction information is relative to the sun's position, not the compass direction, a forager's dance for a particular resource will change over time. This is because the sun's position moves over the course of a day. For example, a food source located due east will have foragers dance approximately straight up in the morning (because the sun rises in the east), but will have foragers dance approximately straight down in the late afternoon (because the sun sets in the west). Thus the time of day (or, more importantly, the location of the sun) is an important variable to interpret the direction information in the dance.
The sun's position is also a function of one's geographic location and the time of year. The sun will always move from from east to west over the course of the day. However, above the tropic of cancer, the sun will always be in the south, whereas below the tropic of capricorn, the sun will always be in the north. Within the tropics, the sun can pass to the south or to the north, depending on the time of year. In summary, in order to translate the direction information contained in the honey bee dance language, one must know the angle of the waggle run (with respect to gravity) and the compass direction of the sun (which depends on location, date, and time of day).
Parrots
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/pepperberg.html
"THAT DAMN BIRD" [9.23.03] A Talk with Irene Pepperberg What the data suggest to me is that if one starts with a brain of a certain complexity and gives it enough social and ecological support, that brain will develop at least the building blocks of a complex communication system. Of course, chimpanzees don't proceed to develop full-blown language the way you and I have. Grey parrots, such as Alex and Griffin, are never going to sit here and give an interview the way you and I are conducting an interview and having a chat. But they are going to produce meaningful, complex communicative combinations. It is incredibly fascinating to have creatures so evolutionarily separate from humans performing simple forms of the same types of complex cognitive tasks as do young children.
http://www.edge.org/video/dsl/pepperberg.html
Introduction by Marc D. Hauser In the late 1960s, a flurry of research on the great apeschimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutansbegan to challenge our uniqueness, especially our capacity for language and abstract conceptual abilities. Everyone soon weighed in on this
lot along the way. Marc D. Hauser, Director of Primate Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at Harvard, and author of Wild Minds: What Animals Think. IRENE PEPPERBERG studies Grey parrots. The main focus of her work is to determine the cognitive and communicative abilities of these birds, and compare their abilities with those of great apes, marine mammals, and young children. She is studying the mechanisms of their learning as well as the outcomes. Dr. Pepperberg is a a research scientist at the MIT School of Architecture and Planning, and a Research Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Brandeis University.
Apes
Speaking to the relatives Where did our capacity for language originate? Many linguists, echoing the influential Noam Chomsky, argue that it's a uniquely human gift. According to this school, chimpanzees and other close relatives could not use language because they lack the human brain structures that make language. But other researchers disagree, pointing out that a few apes can use, at least to some extent, symbolic communications systems -- languages -- like American Sign Language. E. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, a Georgia State University biology professor, says the accepted wisdom reflects a long bias and that modern studies are refuting it. Savage-Rumbaugh studies bonobos -- a relative of ours that, like chimpanzees, shares 98 to 99 percent of human genes. When you spend all day with bonobos, she says, "the differences don't loom very large... They look like us, care like us, smell like us, think like us. They are like us." Speaking at the recent American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Philadelphia, Savage-Rumbaugh observed that since apes don't have a vocal tract, they can't make human language. Previous researchers have tried to overcome that liability by teaching apes sign language. Savage-Rumbaugh uses a "keyboard" consisting of 400 symbols, and what she finds is controversial. "If you talk to apes and point to little symbols, they learn to understand language just as I'm talking to you." Instead of using behaviorism -- rewarding the apes with food each time they use a word correctly -- she allows the animals to pick up words in "normal" conversation. This seems to work. "Watching Kanzi [an experimental bonobo] in casual 'conversation,' one is struck by the intense give and take,"
Go Higher Arts Introduction to Language wrote journalist Stephen Hart (see "The Language of Animals" in the bibliography). Furthermore, the researchers found Kanzi's understanding of new sentences to be about equal to that of a two-and-one-half-year-old child, Hart found.
She suspects that bonobos are using language in the wild, but since they congregate in trees in groups of about 100, "it's almost impossible to study them." And on the ground, they are silent to avoid predators. Please step on the daisies Savage-Rumbaugh also contends that wild bonobos -- only an estimated 4,000 to 40,000 survive in Congo, formerly Zaire -- have a second communication system. This one resembles road signs built of smashed plants rather than steel. The finding grew from the observation that troops of bonobos hang out in various locations during the day. When bonobos go foraging on the ground, the small groups must maintain "radio silence" to evade predators. SavageRumbaugh began wondering how one group manages to follow another to the next hangout. In 1995, Savage-Rumbaugh spent two months studying bonobos at a research station operated by Takayoshi Kano, a Japanese primate researcher in the Congo forest. During two days of following troops with local bonobo trackers, she observed that their trails were clearly marked by smashed plants and branches planted at an angle to the direction of travel.
Although skeptics could counter that she was just seeing trampled plants, she contends they actually were road signs since they occurred only at trail intersections. "These clues are not left at arbitrary points in the vegetation but rather at locations where trails split and where an individual following might be confused as to the correct direction to take." Thus in swamps, where plenty of footprints mark the trail, the road signs are not needed and not seen. While the finding has not been replicated in other primates, Savage-Rumbaugh suspects that it does represent the kind of symbolic communication system humans rely on. "This is the first time that anyone has tried to say that this altered vegetation is communicating anything." This just in -- how babies learn to talk...and talk, and talk.
"My best friend is a chimp" Roger Fouts. Psychology Today. New York: Jul/Aug 2000. Vol.33, Iss. 4; pg. 68, 6 pgs Abstract (Document Summary) Thirty years of working closely with chimpanzees have convinced Fouts that, like humans, chimps nurture family bonds, adopt orphans, mourn the death of mothers, self-medicate and wage war. In fact, chimpanzees are the closest psychological cousins to humans. Copyright Sussex Publishers, Inc. Jul/Aug 2000
It was exactly 33 years ago that 1 first met of one of my oldest and dearest friends. To this day, the most outstanding aspect of her personality remains a quality I noticed the very first time I laid eyes on her: She is one of the most caring and compassionate people I know She's also a chimpanzee. I first encountered Washoe during an interview with R. Allen Gardner, Ph.D., an experimental psychologist at the University of Nevada at Reno. Gardner was seeking assistants to teach his young chimp American Sign Language (ASL); I was
Washoe herself has been the subject of groundbreaking and seminal studies on primate communication. She was the very first nonhuman to learn a human langageASL. Cameras have recorded her signing with other chimps with no humans present, and she even passed her second language on to her adopted son. But I don't need to read clinical studies or technical research texts to see that chimps behave much like we do. After 30 years of conversing with and observing chimpanzees-watching them closely and interacting with them on a day-to-day basisI'm more convinced than ever that chimp and human minds are fundamentally alike. Many scientists beg to differ. In March, for example, Drew Rendall, Ph.D., assistant professor of psychology at Canada's University of Lethbridge, and colleagues published a study in the journal of Comparative Psychology showing that baboons don't respond to each others' callsmother baboons don't even return the calls of their lost infants. Rendall offers this as "proof" that nonhuman primates lack "theory of mind," or the ability to infer another being's thoughts and feelings. The problem with this logic: Scientists often attempt to compare ape, monkey and chimp minds to human minds. When they don't match up, the researchers assume that their intellects are completely unlike ours.
Natural Nurturers One of the emotional traits that people deem most uniquely "human" is empathy Yet empathy is one of Washoe's most obvious personal characteristics. From day one, I had already seen traces of Washoe's ability to react to other creatures' feelingsnamely, mine. But I truly detected her compassion in 1970, when Gardner's entire research unit moved to the Oklahoma Institute of Primate Studies. Here, Washoe was no longer the baby of the family but was now living with chimpanzees a few years younger than herself. The Institute was a sort of home for wayward chimpanzees, so there were always young chimps coming and going. Soon, Washoe seemed to feel responsible for the young transplants, perhaps because she had been one herself. (She had been "wild-collected" from Africa at an early age by the U.S. space program, where she would've become a subject in medical experiments had the Gardners not taken to her during a visit to the program.)
One of the new arrivals, Bruno, had come to Oklahoma after participating in Herbert Terrace's failed language project in New York. He had been raised by humans since birth, so he wasn't trained in basic chimpanzee survival skills or accustomed to the wilds of Oklahoma, where water moccasins and copperheads abounded. Chimpanzees are naturally frightened of snakes. One day, a resident chimp cried out, signaling that snakes were present. All of the animals moved rapidly away from that end of the island, except for Bruno. Washoe was halfway to safety when she turned and saw Bruno sitting on the snake-infested side of the island, blissfully unaware of impending danger. Washoe stood up and emphatically signed "COME HUG COME HUG" to Bruno, but the youngster remained sitting where he was, since he hadn't yet learned ASL. Amazingly, Washoe scurried back to the danger zone, took Bruno by his hand and led him to the safe end of the island. Washoe also displayed her nurturing mentality during even more perilous rescue missions while at the Institute. The island was surrounded by a moat with steep and slippery red clay sides. After a drowning occurred, a two-strand, 3-foot-high electric
Hair-Brained Schemes Chimps' softer, sweeter emotions aren't the only evidence of their intellectual capacity. Their minds are also, like ours, capable of deception, strategy and manipulation. Washoe adopted Loulis when he was 10 months old after having lost two of her own babies. She doted on him. So Loulis would often abuse his special status and Washoe's loving nature to get his way-and to get other chimpanzees in trouble. All he
Bibliography
Apes
Can Video Games Treat Learning Disorders? J. Madeleine Nash, Time Magazine, 29 January, 1996. Do Apes Have Language Sue Savage-Rumbaugh http://whyfiles.org/058language/ape_talk.html Dyslexia, Sally Shaywitz, Scientific American, 11/96, p. 98 ff. Giving Language Skills a Boost, Marcia Barinaga, Science, 5 Jan. '96, pp. 27-8. Infants Remember the Order of Words in a Spoken Sentence, Denise Mandel et al, Cognitive Development, April-June 1996, pp. 181-96. Kanzi: The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and Roger Lewin, 1995, John Wiley and Sons, New York. The Language of Animals, Stephen Hart, Henry Holt, New York, 1996. "My best friend is a chimp" Roger Fouts. Psychology Today. New York: Jul/Aug 2000. Vol.33, Iss. 4; pg. 68, 6 pgs Next of Kin, Roger Fouts, Ph.D. (Bard, 1997) Statistical Learning by 8-month-old Infants, Jenny Saffran et al, Science, December, 1996, v. 274, pp. 1926-8. Teaching Sign Language to Chimpanzees. R. A. Gardner, B.T. Gardner and `h. E. Van Cantfort (SUNY Press, 1989) Word Segmentation: The Role of Distributional Clues, Jenny Saffran et al, Journal of Memory and Language, Aug. 1996, pp. 606-621.
Bees
Taken from the Department of Entomology: NY State University: http://www.cals.ncsu.edu/entomology/apiculture/Dance_language.html, 1/10/07 Anatomy of A Controversy: The Question of a "Language" Among Bees. Wenner, Adrian M. and Patrick H. Wells. 1990Columbia University Press, New York, 399 pp. Bees: Their Vision, Chemical Senses, and Language. Frisch, Karl von. 1976 Cornell University Press, Revised Edition, Ithaca, N.Y., 157 pp. The Dance Language and Orientation of Bees. Frisch, Karl von. 1967; The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 566 pp.
Parrots
"THAT DAMN BIRD" [9.23.03] A Talk with Irene Pepperberg Marc D. Hauser, Marc D.; http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/pepperberg.html 1-10-07
Go Higher Arts Introduction to Language Homework Read: Read ALL the texts below
Academic Reading and How to Make Notes M.E. Clinton The Clever Hans Phenomenon from an Animal Psychologists Point of View Heini K.P. Hediger PDF file
Write
Using the templates in your Academic Reading and How to Make Notes do the note taking exercises.
Analytical Though
Consider how far animals have language as opposed to communication. What do you think makes us different from animals other than things at a surface structure level (i.e. clothes etc). Come prepared next week to argue with three points either: agreeing that man is unique or disagreeing, we are not unique just part of the animal continuum. Next week will be a tutorial, so any aspect that you have not understood (do not say everything) can be discussed in this format. Enjoy, do not get too bogged down. The academic reading is there for you to get used to academic reading. Read it but not all in one sitting. Mary.
that English has about 500,000 words (there are about 450,000 in the 20 volume Oxford English Dictionary, but this excludes many colloquial forms - although it does include many obsolete forms), that English sentences can be up to 100 words in length (a fairly reasonable working assumption) that any individual word can occur 0 to 100 times in a single sentence (an unrealistic assumption) that words can be combined in any order (a false assumption)
then we can determine that there could be as many as about 10570 possible sentences (very much greater than estimates of the number of atoms in the observable universe). Grammatical rules would greatly reduce this number of sentences, as would the requirement that all sentences be meaningful, but the resulting number of possibilities would still be extremely large (more than could ever be spoken in the entire history of human languages let alone during the much shorter life span of an individual language). So for all practical, non-mathematical, purposes we can say that the English language, or any other living language (1), is an open system. It's actually quite easy to come up with a unique, never before produced, sentence. To do so, for example, combine an unlikely (or impossible, or meaningless) event with a particular named person on a particular date. For example: "On 31st October 1999, whilst writing a lecture on animal communication, Robert had a colourless green idea." (2) Once this sentence has been written or spoken, subsequent productions of this same sentence are not unique, but unique sentences may potentially be generated from it by making slight changes to it (eg. change "green" to "red"). If we consider spoken language, then we would come to a similar conclusion if we examine only the word content of spoken sentences. We might additionally consider the manipulation of vocal resonance (frequencies of spectral peaks), vocal pitch (fundamental frequency), vocal loudness (intensity), rate of utterance and the placement and timing of pauses that occur as a consequence of the combined effects of prosody, vocal emotion, and size, age and gender differences. There are potentially an infinite number of infinitesimally different productions of any sentence (infinitesimal differences of frequency, intensity and timing). It is well known, however, that the human brain is only able to discriminate discrete (step-wise) changes in each of these dimensions. Across the possible human vocal range of these acoustic dimensions there is only a finite number of discriminable (just noticeable) steps. Additionally, it is also well established that meaningful changes in each of these
Chemical signals (used by some very simple creatures, including protozoa) Smell (related to chemical signals, eg. pheromones attract, skunk secretions repel)
Language
Touch Movement Posture (eg. dogs, geese) Facial gestures (eg. dogs snarling) Visual signals (eg. feathers) Sound (eg. very many vertebrate and invertebrate calls)
attract (especially mates) repel (especially competitors or enemies) signal aggression or submission advertise species warn of predators communicate about the environment or the availability of food
Some linguists (eg Chomsky, 1957, Macphail, 1982, both cited in Pearce, 1987) have argued that language is a unique human behaviour and that animal communication falls short of human language in a number of important ways.
Most researchers attempting to teach language to animals are attempting to test for the existence of these features in the "language" use of their subjects.
Gardner and Gardner (1969) Chimpanzee (Washoe) American sign language Patterson (1978) Gorilla (Koko) Sign language Premack and Premack (1972) Chimpanzee (Sarah and others) Plastic symbols
Terrace et al (1979) Chimpanzee (Nim Chimpsky) Symbols Rumbaugh and Savage-Rumbaugh Chimpanzee (Sherman and Austin) Symbols on a keyboard Savage-Rumbaugh Bonobo Chimpanzee (Kanzi, Panbanisha) Understanding spoken language Symbols on a keyboard
There are some web pages that you might wish to look at. They describe the work of Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and colleagues. They include:
Great Ape Trust, Iowa, USA A 1995 New York Times article entitled "Chimp Talk Debate: Is it really language?", by George Johnson A British newspaper report (July, 1999) describing the use of a speech synthesiser interfaced to the bonobos' keyboards.
Here are a few web pages that discuss the work of Irene Pepperberg and colleagues with Alex the African Grey Parrot.
The Alex Foundation research page (links to various papers and a short movie) "Studies to determine the intelligence of African Grey Parrots", Irene Pepperberg, 1995
Herman, Richards and Wolz (1984) Dolphins (Akeakamai and Phoenix) Gestures (Akeakamai) Sounds (Phoenix)
1. Bindra, D.; Patterson, F.G.; Terrace, H.S., Petitto, L.A., Sanders, R.J., and Bever, T.G., (1981), "Ape Language", Science, 211, 86-88. (3) 2. Brakke, K.E., & Savage-Rumbaugh, E.S., (1996), "The development of language skills in pan - II. Production", Language & Communication, Vol.16, No. 4, pp. 361-380. 3. Chomsky, N., (1957), Semantic structures, The Hague: Mouton 4. Frisch, K. von, (1962), "Dialects in the language of bees", Scientific American, (also published in:- Wang, W. S-Y., (ed.), (1982), Human communication: Language and its psychobiological bases, Scientific American) 5. Gardner, R.A. & Gardner, B.T., (1969), "Teaching sign language to a chimpanzee", Science, 165, 664-672. 6. Hockett, C.F., (1960), "The origin of speech", Scientific American, (also published in:- Wang, W. S-Y., (ed.), (1982), Human communication: Language and its psychobiological bases, Scientific American) 7. Macphail, E.M., (1982), Brain and intelligence in vertebrates, Oxford: Clarendon 8. Patterson, F.G. (1978). "The gestures of a gorilla: language acquisition in another pongid.", Brain and language 5: 72-97.
Footnotes
10. Premack, A.J., & Premack, D., (1972), "Teaching language to an ape", Scientific American, (also published in:- Wang, W. S-Y., (ed.), (1982), Human communication: Language and its psychobiological bases, Scientific American) 11. Savage-Rumbaugh, E.S., Murphy, J., Sevcik, R.A., Brakke, K.E., Williams, S.L., & Rumbaugh, D.M., (1993), "Language Comprehension in Ape and Child", Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, Serial No. 233, Vol. 58, Nos. 3-4 12. Sparks, J., (1969), Bird behaviour, London: Hamlin. 13. Terrace, H.S., Petitto, L.A., Sanders, R.J., & Bever, T.G., (1979), "Can an ape create a sentence?", Science, 200, 891-902. 14. Williams, S.L., Brakke, K.E., & Savage-Rumbaugh, E.S., (1997), "Comprehension skills of language-competent and nonlanguagecompetent apes", Language & Communication, Vol.17, No. 4, pp. 301-317.
1. This topic was originally presented as a first year linguistics lecture in early November 1999. The content hasn't been significantly updated since then so it's now very likely to be out of date. A continuing effort has been made, however, to keep external links up to date. In some cases, as external links have ceased to exist, local copies of the affected documents have been made available. 2. Click here for a discussion of the claim that a human language can potentially have an infinite number of sentences. 3. This was not a single paper, but was instead 2 commentaries, one by each of Bindra and Patterson, on Terrace et al. (1979), followed by a response by the original authors.