Animal vs human language

Arbitrariness
Human:
* There is no natural connection between a word’s form and its meaning * A written word does not look like its meaning.
Animals:
* Animal communicative sounds are closely correlated with their meanings. * An animal’s „vocabulary“ is finite and limited.

Displacement * Humans can talk about the past, present or future. * Humans can talk about things that don’t exist or we can’t see. * Animal communication is about the here and now. * Animals can’t displace in either time or space.

Productivity * Human vocabulary and sentences are infinite and open-ended: We can create new words in our Lexicon in unlimited combinations. „Colourless green ideas sleep furiously“ (Noam Chonsky). * We have a morphology and a grammar which allows us to combine new words in new structures.

Cultural Transmission * We acquire our speech from the environment we are raised in, our culture, which includes our language, our accent and our expressions.

A meow is a meow wherever because it is instinctual, inborn.
Some birds are born with some calls and songs instinctually and some are learned.
7 week window for birds: If birds are not exposed to bird song in the first 7 weeks, they will still produce songs, but abnormal ones. Song-singing is instinctual.
7 years window for children: If a child is not exposed to language within the first 7 years, it will develop no language at all. Language is not instinctual: it is learned in the cultural environment. More properly, it is acquired.

Duality
Human language is organized at two levels: * Distinct sounds (Phonetics) which carry no individual meaning * Distinct meanings: combination of sounds (Phonology and Morphology)

APES:

Viki the chimpanzee
Researchers tried to teach a young chimpanzee to articulate English words. Her vocal tract was not up to the challenge.

Washoe the chimpanzee
Washoe learned approximately 350 words of ASL (=American Sign Language). She also taught her adopten son Loulis some ASL.
Washoe and her mates were able to combine the hundred of signs that they learned into novel combinations with different meanings.

Sarah the chimpanzee
She was taught to use a set of plastic shapes for the purpose of communicating with humans. These plastic shapes represented ‘words’ that could be arranged in sequence to build ‘sentences’. Sarah was capable of producing ‘sentences’ such as “Mary give chocolate Sarah” and had the capacity to understand complex structures such as “If Sarah put red on green, Mary give Sarah chocolate.”

Lana the chimpanzee
The language she learned was called ‘Yerkish’ and consisted of a set of symbols on a large keyboard linked to a computer. When Lana wanted some water, she had to press the symbols, in the correct sequence, to produce the message: “please machine give water”.

The controversy
The psychologist Herbert Terrace argued that chimpanzees simply produce signs in response to the demands of people and tend to repeat signs those people use, yet they are treated as if they are taking part in a ‘conversation’.
Chimpanzees are clever creatures that learn to produce a certain type of behaviour in order to get rewards and are essentially performing sophisticated ‘tricks’.
A group of younger chimpanzees not only learned sign language, but also occasionally used signs with each other, even when there were no humans present.

Apes can communicate with a wide range of vocal calls, but they just can’t make human speech sounds!