PSYC 050 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Waggle Dance, Bird Vocalization, Kanzi
Document Summary
Conscious of the present; conscious of the past: language. Studies looking at babies show pretty much the moment theyre born they favor their language. Theres no phonology, morphology, syntax, combinatory systems or arbitrary names. The controversy comes when we get to famous cases of primates trained by humans, like kanzi. Many scientists argue that these animals learn few words and takes them years to learn. The utterances often have order that is limited and lacks recursion. Finally, the utterances of trained chimps are very repetitive. We don"t usually expect a species to acquire a language of another. You might say chimps are smart and should use language. Human capacity to learn language doesn"t just come down to smartness. So we expect to share a lot of abilities. None of this says the study of non human communication systems isn"t interesting. Theres a linguistic of human language that has delineated the principles that underly all human languages.
