ANİMALS AND HUMAN LANGUAGE

 Communicative X Informative signals

 Intentional X Unintentional communication
 Properties:
 Reflexivity: We can use language to think and
talk about language itself.
 Examples?
 Displacement: Here and now? (time, place,
truth, imagination)
 Examples?
 What about bee communication?
 Arbitrariness (onomatopoeic words?)
ANİMALS AND HUMAN LANGUAGE
 Productivity: Humans create new expressions and
utterances to describe new objects and situations
(creativity & open endedness)
 Bee experiment?

 Cultural transmission (acquisition in a culture x animal

instinctive language)
 Duality (limited sounds x many combinations)
TALKİNG TO ANİMALS
 Behaviourism? Conditioning? Training?
 Chimpanzees and language: Why?
 Gua: understands about a hundred words but
cannot say utter any of them
 Viki: raised as a human child. Poor articulation
of human sounds?
 Washoe and Koko: Raised like a human child.
ASL? She could use and combine words to
make sentences, questions and answers?
 (‘Open food drink’)
 Water bird referring to a swan? How do you
explain?
TALKİNG TO ANİMALS
 Sarah (caged?) (plastic shapes in building
sentences? How do you explain the
arbitrariness?)
 Lana (Yerkish symbols>computer?) (How do you
explain the arbitrariness?)
 Kanzi: started to use Yerkish easily? Used
gentle noises as words to refer to things such
as bananas etc.
 How do you explain?(first language acquisition?
Age? Exposure?)
 Nim (learned behaviour? Conditioning?)
PROPERTİES OF LANGUAGE
 Vocal-auditory channel
 Specialisation

 Non-directionality (no inherent direction)

 Rapid-fade

 Reciprocity (sender & receiver)

 Prevarication (truth and false)