Lala

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Animals and human language

One evening in the mid-1980s my wife and I were returning from an evening cruise around Boston Harbor and decided to take a waterfront stroll. We were passing in front of the Boston Aquarium when a gravelly voice yelled out, “Hey! Hey! Get outa there!” Thinking we had mistakenly wandered somewhere we were not allowed, we stopped and looked around for a securityguard or some other official, but saw no one, and no warning signs. Again the voice boomed, “Hey! Hey you!” As we tracked the voice we found ourselves approaching a large, glass-fenced pool in front of the aquarium where four harbor seals were lounging on display. Incredulous, I traced the source of the command to a large seal reclining vertically in the water, with his head extended back and up,his mouth slightly open, rotating slowly. A seal was talking, not to me, but to the air, and incidentally to anyone within earshot who cared to listen. Deacon (1997) There are a lot of stories about creatures that can talk. We usually assume that they are fantasy or fiction or that they involve birds or animals simply imitating something they have heard humans say (as Deacon discovered was the casewith the loud seal in Boston Aquarium). Yet we know that creatures are capable of communicating, certainly with other members of their own species. Is it possible that a creature could learn to communicate with humans using language? Or does human language have properties that make it so unique that it is quite unlike any other communication system and hence unlearnable by any other creature? Toanswer these questions, we will first consider some special properties of human language, then review a number of experiments in communication involving humans and animals.

Communicative and informative signals
We should first distinguish between specifically communicative signals and those which may be unintentionally informative signals. Someone listening to you may become informed about youthrough a number of signals that you have not intentionally sent. She may note that you have a cold (you sneezed), that you aren’t at ease (you shifted around in your seat), that you are disorganized (non-matching socks) and that you are from some other part of the country (you

Animals and human language

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have a strange accent). However, when you use language to tell this person, I’d liketo apply for the vacant position of senior brain surgeon at the hospital, you are normally considered to be intentionally communicating something. Similarly, the blackbird is not normally taken to be communicating anything by having black feathers, sitting on a branch and looking down at the ground, but is considered to be sending a communicative signal with the loud squawking produced when a catappears on the scene. So, when we talk about distinctions between human language and animal communication, we are considering both in terms of their potential as a means of intentional communication.

Displacement
When your pet cat comes home and stands at your feet calling meow, you are likely to understand this message as relating to that immediate time and place. If you ask your cat where ithas been and what it was up to, you’ll probably get the same meow response. Animal communication seems to be designed exclusively for this moment, here and now. It cannot effectively be used to relate events that are far removed in time and place. When your dog says GRRR, it means GRRR, right now, because dogs don’t seem to be capable of communicating GRRR, last night, over in the park. Incontrast, human language users are normally capable of producing messages equivalent to GRRR, last night, over in the park, and then going on to say In fact, I’ll be going back tomorrow for some more. Humans can refer to past and future time. This property of human language is called displacement. It allows language users to talk about things and events not present in the immediate environment....