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112 If you have human language - you have words
In the 1980s to researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney, published some attentiongrabbing data about the communication of African vervet monkeys. The researchers confirmed in 1967 discovery that the monkeys made specific, wordlike warning calls in response to particular predators.
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There was great excitement at these findings, which suggested that we had finally found evidence of an animal word that worked the same way a human word does. The last common ancestor of vervets and humans lived around 30 million years ago. Was it possible that all you needed to achieve the complexity of human language was a proliferation of words, some syntactic rules to make them all work together, and 30 million years? And did this mean that words preceded humans?
For a number of reasons, I turned out, the answer is probably no. But it is a gray kind of „no“, and the reason the vervet cries are not satisfying candidates as animal words is not the most important thing about them.
Vervet alarm-calls-as-words had such appeal in the scientific community and the popular press in part because these animals are relatively close kin to humans. Alarm calls from vervets were much easier to imagine as the antecedents of our language than if they had been coming from a chicken.
But alarm calls are ubiquitous in the animal world. Monkeys have them. Ground squirrels have them. Meercats have them. And, yes, even chickens make alarm calls, distinguishing between terrestrial and aerial predators.
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„Alarm calls seem to be a prime candidate for language evolution“, Tecumseh Fitch says, „but they are not“. The calls are not like human words, because they are genetically preprogrammed: animals will produce them even went raised in isolation.“What vervets have is the ability to communicate a very limited set of meanings“, he explained, „and because it is genetically determined, there is no way other than genetic modification to add new units into the system. Each call type has to evolve over Darwinian time“.
Boe: animal words, alarm calls, evolution of communication (Tecumseh Fitch)
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If alarm calls are not words, then what are they? „They are not words in the same sense of language“,Fitch explained. „They are more like laughter and crying, which are also calls that are innate. You don't need to hear your mother crying to learn how to cry. Deaf children make these sounds too“.
We don't know exactly how these calls evolved, but it is not hard to imagine that if you were a vervet monkey with a tendency to laugh hysterically and run up a tree every time you saw a little part heading your way, then you and your troupe might end up more likely to survive and to reproduce. When you did reproduce, you would pass on that genetic predisposition to at least some of your children.
Instead of seeing alarm calls as a primitive form of language, we should look at them as a communication device that many animals share. Across a wide swath of life, animals as genetically distant as birds and mammals have evolved distinct units of sound to act as pointers to things in the real world. It could even be argued that human calls - laughter and crying, which certainly intersect closely with language - are degenerate form of the alarm calls of prey species.
Some researchers still think it is possible that alarm calls are a kind of protoword - that we somehow broke the link between the vocal token and the DNA, retaining the ability to use freely a sound token to refer to things in the world. There is some interesting neurological evidence for this possibility. It is possible neurobiologically to separate swear words from other words in language. Swearing actually uses parts of the brain that support language and also parts of the brain that are used when laughing and crying. Often people the severe brain damage and remain able to swear even when they are unable to produce other language. Perhaps swearing is a remnant of an evolutionary step at which cries were some mix of automatic and voluntary articulation. While the possibility cannot be ruled out altogether, the safest conclusion at this stage is that alarm calls are probably not the antecedents of words.
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The vervet story invokes many of our muddled ideas about animal communication and how it compares with human comunication. There is the notion that animal vocalisations are just gibberish, the opposite of language, and much like what we produce if we cry out nonverbally - informationless sound that provides a crude guide to an emotional state. And there is the contrary idea that animals use codes to communicate with one another, as we do, but we just haven't cracked it yet. Both these approaches assume that animal communication will be recognizable in the terms we use to understand our own language, that it has words, or it doesn't. It has syntax, or it doesn't. It's full of meaning, or has no meaning and no reference whatsoever.
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What matters about the alarm calls and a surprisingly obvious but until now has rarely been commended on: when animals make their alarm calls, they are connecting a particular sound to a referent in the world. Whether the animal arrived at this behaviour genetically, or not, it appears that it is a widespread easily evolved, and useful trait.
„Every species where researchers have tried - and that includes dogs, dolphins, parrots, and chimps - can link sound and a reference“, said Fitch. „I don't think this is some sort of special human ability. It's a pretty general ability. What else is your brain for? If your brain can't link two stimuli in the world, one which is visual and the other which is auditory, then what good is it? I wouldn't be surprised if fish could do this, but no one has really tried to see if they can“. So the act of hearing a particular sound and making meaning out of it is not particularly human; it is ancient.
Boe: Intentionality -aboutness - meaning -Sinn (Luhmann)
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Other animals appeared to have built on the ability to make meaning from the connection between a sound and a referent, as with human words. Dolphins use echolocation clicks, and different types of whistles. „Signature whistles“ are so named because it appears that dolphins name themselves. They reproduce a distinct, individual sound that develops in their first year of life whenever they meet another dolphin. It is always the same, and all this distinct from any other Dolphins whistle.
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Chimpanzee pant hoots are another interesting wordlike call. The pant hoots are very loud cries that are most often used to communicate over distances. Their functions seems at least in part to be to rally support and keep individuals in a group together. Pant hoots also differ between individuals and between different chimpanzee groups. Chimpanzees appear to be able to pick and choose which ones to use. They are somewhat like dolphin signature whistles because they seem to have an internal structure and are uttered in various situations, such as resting, feeding, and during travel and display.
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These findings suggest that our closest relatives have built upon the sound-referent connection to communicate distinctions to one another in a similar way that we do. There is more than just genetics involved with pant hoots, as well as signature whistles, and time and more research will help tell us the ways in which these sounds and meanings resembles human words. Certainly, it looks as if the voluntary production of sounds that are meaningful to another creature is not a uniquely human ability.
The ability to interpret another animal's utterance is so universal that even animals of different species can understand the cries that other creatures make. Seyfarth and Cheney have observed that predated us that here the alarm call of their prey often give up the hunt at the sound - they know they have been seen.
Said Fitch, „What I think is interesting and surprising and we didn't know twenty years ago is that animals have an asymmetry between perception and production. This appears to be one of the key differences in being able to communicate with words or not“.
While other mammals appeared to be very good at making meaning from sound-plus-reference combinations, they do not necessarily produce new sounds in connection with new objects in the way we do. „The intuition is that if you can see something you must be able to produce a word for it“, Fitch explained, „but that is where the data is completely clear - it is not so. Dogs can bark, but they do not create new box to correspond to new sounds, and chimps can scream, and they can even withhold their screams in certain contexts, but they cannot freely create new screams to correspond to new things“.
Clearly there are varied ways that ancient capacities are used by different species, but being able to both understand and produce words is one of our special talents. Over time, we have produced hundreds of thousands of words, and there is little evidence that animals naturally produced many wordlike tokens at all. Individually we learned tens of thousands of words in a lifetime, and if we want, we can make up as many as we like. Language is in a constant flux, so regardless of our own individual contribution to language change, words do inevitably become altered over hundreds of years. Many animals are able to comprehend that new sounds canned referred to a new objects, but they are not even remotely as adept at inventing words themselves.
Human words are much more than just links between sound and reference in the world. Indeed, reference is not the half of it. Word is an arbitrary association between sound and meaning. There is nothing in the sound of a word that tells you what it means what it does - you must learn this as a child.
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A child's ability to learn many words is so completely different from anything observed in other species that many researchers propose that some neural mechanism must be specially dedicated to this acquisition of linguistic knowledge. Beyond the basic link between an unanalysed sound and a simple reference in the world, words are clusters of complex knowledge about sound, grammar, and meaning. Human words don't exist by themselves. They are points in a series of intersecting systems, and when you hear a producer words, all these systems coming to play. Recent research has shown that when children acquire words, they are not just creating a multidimensional connection between different kinds of linguistic and nonlinguistic knowledge based on a platform of sound and meaning. The essential scaffolding for word learning is more complicated than that. As well as a connection between two domains, such as the aural and the visual, there is a very important connection between speaking words and gesturing meaning.
Boe: body language, gesture - language production - language comprehension
Christine Kenneally
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