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To What Extent Does Language Make Humans Distinctive To Other Animals
By James Keightley of giggleberries
Language is a distinctive feature of humans and was defined by Harley (1995) as, ‘associating a finite number of words with particular meanings or concepts and using a finite number of rules to combine those words in to a potentially infinite number of sentences’. However, the ability to communicate is not unique to humans and is possessed by other animals. Ethological studies discovered that worker bees return to the hive and perform a dance to signal to their colony that they have found pollen and nectar. Vervet monkeys have been observed to give alarm calls that differ according to the threat. A particular call communicates the presence of a snake causing others to look down, whilst another causes them to look to the sky if an eagle is sighted. Whilst there are some similarities between the communication and linguistic abilities of humans and other animals, there are distinct differences that illustrate the characteristics that make humans unique. Various approaches have explored the nature and origins of these differences and the intention is to explore the extent of any such differences and how they set humans apart from other animals. Aitchinson (1983) identified four features of language that were particular to humans; structure dependency, creativity, semanticity and displacement. Semanticity reflects the human ability to understand the representative meaning of words and displacement is the ability to talk about things that are not necessarily in any particular place or time, we are able to talk about the past, present and future. It is the last two that are considered particularly definitive of human language. However, studies with apes have served to illustrate the extent of their similarities and differences with human language and that they may possess some limited ability of these human characteristics. One particular study by Savage-Rumbaugh et al (1998) who trained a Chimpanzee called Kanzi to use a keyboard to make requests to the trainer by using up to 256 symbols in strings of 2 or 3. Kanzi had been playing in the garden with his trainer and a water hose. He used the keyboard to request another game by pressing the symbols for ‘water’ and ‘chase’. He was also requested by his trainer to retrieve an apple from upstairs and would do so by ignoring all other apples and selecting one from upstairs in preference to others. Savage-Rumbaugh claims that the linguistic ability of Kanzi was equal to that of a 2 ½ year old child and these examples illuminate the possibility of non human animals to communicate and understand the meaning of symbols in order to carry out and make requests. Pearce (1987) defined, ‘a signal has meaning if it excites a representation of the event to which it relates’ and it would appear that apes do have similar abilities to humans as they are able to communicate by using symbols to represent events in their environment. They also seem dependent on both the sender and receiver of the message being able to construct the same representation of the meaning of the message. However, the extent to which Kanzi understood meaning has been questioned and it’s suggested his understanding of symbols is nothing more than a conditioned responses to stimuli and not due to semanticity. There still remains a huge difference between the languages of other animals and humans. Non human animals have no ability for displacement and can only communicate about ‘here and now’ events and language appears to by relatively fixed, where human language continues to develop, providing greater ability to convey semanticity. The importance and uniqueness of meaning and semanticity to humans is extended by cognitive psychologists. Mayer and Schvaneveldt (1971) demonstrated with ‘lexical decision tasks’ that semantic priming of words assists word recognition. This is extended by Reicher (1969) who found that letters were more easily recognized when contained within a string of letters that formed a meaningful word, known as ‘word superiority effect’. These theories highlight the cognitive perspective that prior knowledge and its ‘computational processing’, is an essential element of being able to understand the meaning of language. This is further illustrated by the constructionist model of processing language, where bottom up sensory information is integrated with top down knowledge in order to make sense of the language. Psychologists postulate that an essential aspect of understanding meaning is ‘lexicon’, a mental dictionary for each word that contains its phonology (pronunciation), orthography (spelling), semantics (definition), and syntactic information (role within a sentence). This further signifies the importance of prior knowledge in the understanding and building representations of meaning. Social Constructionists view the meaning of language very much as a social process, involving an understanding between the people communicating. It distinguishes between understanding what is said and interpreting the meaning, as a process of interaction between the speaker and listener; where meanings are constructed and contested and that knowledge is a crucial part of its dynamics. Meaning lies in the purpose of the communication and its interpretation by the listener and is a dynamic social activity for people to interpret and understand the world. Having said all this, the extent of linguistic abilities in animals is difficult to determine because of anatomical differences. They have different vocal tracts to those of humans, which limit their ability to produce language. Consequently, it is not possible to fully investigate the extent to which non human primates understand structural dependency and semanticity, their level of creativity and in fact the extent of prior knowledge. This is not the only anatomical difference that restricts the extent of their linguistic ability. The phanum temporal area of the human cortex is involved in language and damage to this area results in language disorders. It is the left hemisphere of the phanum temporal area that has been found to be larger in humans, illustrating the anatomical differences that restrict the complexity of language in non human animals and perhaps serves to keep their language relatively fixed.
Pinker (1994) concluded that, ‘Language is a unique human ability’ and there have been many approaches to understand how human language has come to surpass that of other animals. Anatomical differences are one suggestion, but another suggests that human language evolved due to the greater adaptive advantage it presented. Our ancestors were faced with evolutionary selection pressures, created by new social and technical problems in an environment that was becoming increasingly complex. It is argued that survival and reproduction became dependent on cognitive abilities to solve the problems necessary to meet survival needs as hunter gatherers. This would have involved the ability to safeguard social groups, out manoeuvre, manipulate and exploit others using competitive, calculating and co-operative skills. These enhanced skills would have required a Theory of Mind; ability described by Sperber (2000) as ‘metarepresentation’, the adeptness to ‘model’ what others are thinking. For example, ‘I think he thinks I am thinking that……’ Although this ability does not necessarily require language, it would have had a huge adaptive value by facilitating the ability to formulate and communicate our cognitive process. It would permit us to convey knowledge, values, infer and be creative. We would have been able to respond to assumptions within the social sphere based on the beliefs and desires of another in a collaborative way, which would allow achievements that, might otherwise have been unattainable as individuals. Premack & Woodruff’s (1988) studies of Sarah, a chimpanzee, demonstrated that non-human apes exercise rudimentary aspects of theory of mind in solving problems, which supports the findings and claims of Savage-Rumbaugh. However, the capacity for other animals to demonstrate a theory of mind is limited. It is argued that cognitive abilities, coupled with those anatomical differences, resulted in the limited ability of metarepresentation, and human language surpassing the linguistic abilities of non human primates. Sperber (2000) also highlighted the importance of semanticity and structural dependency for metarepresentation as a key element of language. This supports the emphasis of semanticity, amongst other key characteristics, that Aitchinson identified as being particular to humans, and extends the differences between humans and non human primates. The evolutional perspective also extends the importance of meaning and knowledge in the linguistic abilities of humans, and supports the explanations of cognitive and constructionist perspectives. Evolutionary psychology sees the adaptive advantage of language as being a consequence of metarepresentation, which evolved due to selection pressure and existed in an environment that was becoming increasingly social and complex. This was something that our closest relatives, the modern ape, did not face and helps us understand why human language surpassed them, as it had little adaptive value in their own environment, which was far less social and technical. This is complimented by Social Constructionists perspective that language is firmly entrenched in social processes, and like the evolutionary approach sees the creation of meaning as being located outside of the individual. The cognitive perspective views the computational process of the mind as creating meaning, communicated by language, which is a complex cognitive process unique to humans. Whilst this provides an understanding of why apes have limited linguistic ability, it is acknowledged that modern apes do have some elementary abilities of metarepresentation and characteristics of human language. However, together with our evolutionary divergence and anatomical differences, the linguistic abilities of other animals (notably those of modern apes) appear fixed and far less developed than those of humans, making it a distinctive feature. Yet, whilst it may be widely accepted that the linguistic abilities of modern apes are not as advanced, previous research has been limited in its ability to fully investigate the extent of language of other animals. This was highlighted by the research of Savage-Rumbaugh with Kanzi whose choice of responses was limited just to 256 symbols.
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This intel was contributed by Jimbob
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May, 2012
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