It was mentioned in that one review that studies of animal intelligence often get a lot of popular press (ALEX AND ME?), even to the point of exceeding their professional publication. I think this speaks to our very deep desire to communicate with animals, to believe that they have things going on in inside their minds, and even more importantly than to be able to communicate our wishes and feelings to them, to finally be able to find out what they are thinking. What pet owner doesn't want to know what their dog is thinking all day while they are gone at work. And if only we could ask them. I remember the David Sedaris story where he says that people were saying "If only the dog could talk" in the OJ Simpson trial (the Kato Calen? dog? I don't remember) and how, at the time, he thought, yes, if only it could! Let's ask it! or whatever. And the same about these worms that they sent up into space or on the the challenger or something. :) I think that's a great, wonderful example of the improbility of animals communicating with us actually sounding so appealing.
Dogs
Here is a relatively recent study involving dog language that sounds pretty great. I heard about this article on NPR, called Dog Prodigy Gives New Meaning to Language: Border Collie Quick to Learn and Remember New Words"The research, reported in the current issue of Science, centers around canine prodigy Rico. The Border collie can recognize the names of more than 250 toys and fetch them on command.
To test Rico's learning ability, researchers with the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology placed a new toy among seven familiar toys. When the owner asked Rico to fetch the new item, using a name the Border collie had never heard before, Rico correctly retrieved the new item seven out 10 times. Even more remarkable: Not only can Rico connect a new word with a new object on the first try, he can also remember the word when tested a month later.
"We know now that the dog can rapidly associate new words with new objects, which is just what children do right at the point that language takes off," says Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, a Georgia State University researcher who works with great apes. "So the dog's on the border of very complex language ability."
These abilities seen in animals such as dogs, bonobos and orangutans, go against the theory that only humans have the capacity for language, and that it came from a genetic mutation in the past 200,000 years or so."
Pigs
Curtis hopes to teach a crude language to pigs by teaching them words for images and building a vocabulary. The objective is simple: build a better hog house. "If we're going to build a better piggery so that animals' needs and wants are being supported, then we need to know more about what they need and want," he says. Designing hog houses this way would be both humane and practical, he argues.
This "Curtis" refers to a researcher named Stanley Curtis, who actually teaches at UIUC. I haven't looked up to see if he has actually taught pigs a rudimentary language yet, but I'm pretty excited about this possibility.
From PSU Article
Though animals may be physically limited in their ability to produce language, perhaps their abilities to comprehend it are far less limited.
"It was shown, instead, that comprehension did not automatically flow from language production. The preeminence of comprehension in language development, only recently appreciated in the ape language field, has long been emphasized among those studying child language. Language comprehension by young children develops earlier than language production, and even into adulthood comprehension vocabularies exceed speaking vocabularies." From Language Learning which actually talks more specifically about dolphins but has a good general introduction.
Dolphins
This may be where dolphins come into the picture.From reading the Language Learning article, it looks like dolphins seem to have some syntactic understanding as well as semantic (the author makes that argument) . . . that word order and sentence structure understood and can be manipulated. I wonder what Steven Pinker and those like him say about this kind of research. His deepest criticism of Savage-Rumbaugh's work was that simply understanding signs is not the same as possessing language, since language requires syntactic abilities as well. Of course, these dolphins, again, can't PRODUCE the same kind of language, but if they can understand it . . .
Kewalo Basin dolphin language studies. The work on dolphin language competencies by Louis Herman and colleagues at the Kewalo Basin Marine Mammal Laboratory in Honolulu was begun in the mid-1970s and emphasized language comprehension from the start. These researchers, working principally with a bottlenosed dolphin named Akeakamai housed at the laboratory, constructed a sign language in which words were represented by the gestures of a person’s arms and hands. The words referred to objects in the dolphin’ habitat, to actions that could be taken to those objects, and to relationships that could be constructed between objects. There were also location words, left and right, expressed relative to the dolphin’s location, that were used to refer to a particular one of two objects having the same name, e.g., left hoop vs. right hoop. Syntactic rules, based on word order, governed how sequences of words could be arranged into sentences to extend meaning. The vocabulary of some 30 to 40 words, together with the word-order rules, allowed for many thousands of unique sentences to be constructed. The simplest sentences were instructions to the dolphin to take named actions to named objects. For example, a sequence of two gestures glossed as surfboard over directs the dolphin to leap over the surfboard, and a sequence of three gestures glossed as left Frisbee tail-touch directs the dolphin to touch the Frisbee on her left with her tail. More complex sentences required the dolphin to construct a relationship between two objects, such as taking one named object to another named object or placing one named object in or on another named object. To interpret relational sentences correctly, the dolphin had to take account of both word meaning and word order. For example, a sequence of three gestures glossed as person surfboard fetch tells the dolphin to bring the surfboard to the person (who is in the water), but surfboard person fetch, the same three gestures rearranged, requires that the person be carried to the surfboard. By incorporating left and right into these relational sentences, highly complex instructions could be generated. For example, the sequence of five gestures glossed as left basket right ball in asks the dolphin to place the ball on her right into the basket on her left. In contrast, the rearranged sequence right basket left ball in means the opposite, “put the ball on the left into the basket on the right.” The results published by Louis Herman, Douglas Richards, and James Wolz showed that the dolphin was proficient at interpreting these various types of sentences correctly, as evidenced by her ability to carry out the required instructions, including instructions new to her experience. These were the first published results showing convincingly an animal’s ability to process both semantic and syntactic information in interpreting language-like instructions. Semantics and syntax are considered core attributes of any human language.
There was also a study done with similar constructs involving a sea lion named Rocky, but it seemed like he was processing things differently. "Additionally, unlike the dolphin, the sea lion’s string of gestures were given discretely, each gesture followed by a pause during which the sea lion looked about to locate specified objects before being given the next gesture in the string. In contrast, gestural strings given to the dolphin Akeakamai were without pause, analogous to the spoken sentence in human language."
Anyway, they go one to further give some examples of evidence that semantics and syntactics are both being adequately understood:
Akeakamai’s knowledge of the grammar of the language. As a test of Akeakamai’s grammatical knowledge of the language she had been taught, Louis Herman, Stan Kuczaj, and Mark Holder constructed anomalous gestural sentences. These were sentences that violated the syntactic rules of the language or the semantic relations among words. The researchers then studied the dolphin’s spontaneous responses to these sentences. For example, the researchers compared the dolphin’s responses to three similar gestural sequences: person hoop fetch, person speaker fetch, and person speaker hoop fetch. The first sequence is a proper instruction; it violates no semantic or syntactic rule of the learned language. It directs the dolphin to bring the hoop to the person, which the dolphin does easily. The second sequence is a syntactically correct sequence but is a semantic anomaly inasmuch as it directs the dolphin to take the underwater speaker, firmly attached to the tank wall, to the person. The dolphin typically rejects sequences like this, by not initiating any action. The final sequence is a syntactic anomaly in that there is no sequential structure in the grammar of the language that provides for three object names within a sequence. However, embedded in the four-item anomaly are two semantically and syntactically correct three-item sequences, person hoop fetch and speaker hoop fetch. The dolphin in fact typically extracts one of these subsets and carries out the instruction implicit in that subset, by taking the hoop to the person or to the underwater speaker.
These different types of responses revealed a rather remarkable and intelligent analysis of the sequences. Thus, the dolphin did not terminate her response when an anomalous initial sequence such as person speaker was first detected. Instead, she continued to process the entire sequence, apparently searching backward and forward for proper grammatical structures as well as proper semantic relationships, until she found something she could act on, or not. This analytic type of sequence processing is part and parcel of sentence processing by human listeners.
And now for something kind of amazing that has to do with representation in a more abstract way, though it still relates to language.
As viewers, we understand this and often respond to the displayed content similarly to how we might respond to the real world. We of course understand that it is a representation, and not the real world. It appears, however, that an appreciation of television as a representation of the real world does not come easily to animals, even to apes. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh wrote in her book, Ape Language, that chimpanzees show at most a fleeting interest in television, and that from their behavior it was not possible to infer that they were seeing anything more than changing patterns or forms. Her own language -trained chimpanzee subjects, Sherman and Austin, only learned to attend to and interpret television scenes after months of exposure in the presence of human companions who reacted to the scenes by exclaiming or vocalizing at appropriate times. Louis Herman, Palmer Morrel-Samuels and Adam Pack tested whether the dolphin Akeakamai might respond appropriately to language instructions delivered by a trainer whose image was presented on a television screen. Akeakamai had never been exposed to television of any sort previously. Then, for the first time, the researchers simply placed a television monitor behind one of the underwater windows in the dolphin’s habitat and directed Akeakamai to swim down to the window. On arriving there she saw an image of the trainer on the screen. The trainer then proceeded to give Akeakamai instructions through the familiar gestural language. The dolphin watched and then turned and carried out the first instruction correctly and also responded correctly to 11 of 13 additional gestural instructions given her at that same testing session. In further tests, Akeakamai was able to respond accurately even to degraded images of the trainer, consisting, for example, of a pair of white hands moving about in black space. The overall results suggested that Akeakamai spontaneously processed the television displays as representations of the gestural language she had been exposed to live for many years previously.
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