Track 4

Unit 9

Linguistics

Animal Communication

Pages 86 and 87

Listen for main ideas and listen for details

How many of you have parts? They’re great, aren’t they? I’ve got a golden retriever myself and often I feel that my dog is communicating with me. But do animals really communicate like we do? Well, Harvard professor Mark Houser has identified several types of the animal communication. And like humans they do use sounds and nonverbal behavior to communicate. For instance, they convey information to one another. They establish and maintain social organization and they express the perceptions of the world.

So today we’ll look at animal communication through the lens of human language. Specifically we use four basic characteristics of human language to see how animal and human communication styles compare. I think that you’ll be surprised that how sophisticated animal communication is. But ultimately, we’ll see that human communication is far more flexible and better developed.

Now the first characteristic we’ll look at is arbitrariness. Arbitrariness means that there is no logical relationship between a sound and its meaning. For example, the word sky has no relationship with the thing it refers to, right? In comparison, a lot of animal communication is not arbitrary. For example, the growl of an angry dog is meant to very directly warning threaten. There’s nothing arbitrary about this message, right?

However, some animal communication is arbitrary, albeit to a limited degree. For example, meerkats, a small African animal can make about 20 distinct sounds. There’s one alarm call for snakes another for eagles and yet another for large cats, just to name a few, okay? This is impressive but human languages are far more flexible because they have a wide range of sounds. English for example has more than 40 distinct sounds such as A, K or T. And we can make an unlimited number of arbitrary words by altering these sounds far more than any animal.

The second characteristic of human language we’ll compare is displacement. Displacement is communicating ideas about things that are not physically present. For example, if you talk about what you did last weekend, that’s displacement. Now, can animals do this? Well, often the answer is they can’t. For instance if your dog doesn’t like the neighbor cat, maybe it barks when it sees the cat but when the cat isn’t around, the dog doesn’t bark. It doesn’t communicate his dislike of the cat. This shows that the dog doesn’t have the capacity for displacement.

Well, one exception to this is bees. Many types of bees use displacement in their dances. Through these dances they’re able to communicate to other bees the distance, direction, quality and quantity of a food source. The meaning of the dance is so clear and so precise that even scientists researching bee dances can interpret exactly where the food is.

In any case, although I think that the bees is an excellent example of the sophistication of animal communication, in general animal’s use of displacement is extremely limited compare to the humans. Think about books, magazines and the Internet, I mean, everything that we read involves displacement, as do most of our conversations.

The third characteristic of human language that I want to consider is called cultural transmission. The idea that language is passed from one generation to the next. Now, obviously human’s excel at this but what about animals? Well, some animals are also fairly skilled at passing language onto their young. A good example of this is the killer whale. They live in groups and different groups develop different accents, just like people. The accents are passed from older to younger killer whales.

Well, this is yet another example of the sophistication of some animal communication. However once again what we see is that while animal and human communication share similarities, the characteristics that we are looking for are far more developed in humans. For example, in addition to accents, humans also pass an extremely large vocabularies and complex grammar.

The fourth and last characteristic that we’ll talk about today is called discreteness. This means that language is made up of discrete units that can be combined in different ways to create different meanings. As humans, we do this by using sounds to make words and using grammar to arrange those words in the sentences.

The best example we have of animals using discreteness is from chimpanzees raised in captivity. Using a keyboard, chimps had made a request for food by typing raisin peanut which seemed to mean raisins and peanuts. Chimps have also invented phrases to describe things. For example, one chimp called watermelon drink fruit, clever, ha? But while this is fairly impressive, one major problem with the chimpanzees use of language is that their word order is quite random. So most linguists would say that the chimpanzees really do not understand and use grammar in the way that humans do. And therefore can’t be said to use discreteness.

In the use of discreteness, we see that humans have a huge advantage over animals. Discreteness allows us to make complex words and sentences that communicate an unlimited number of meanings. And this is one of the really impressive, actually amazing aspects of human communication.