LING 1100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Animal Communication, Animal Language, Vocal Tract
19 Jan 2017
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Document Summary
Modalities: sound, sound inaudible to humans, visual (posture, facial expressions, colour, touch, chemical communication, electrical signals. Why apes ca(cid:374)"t speak: humans have vocal tract that maximizes distinctions between speech sounds, apes have: Communication with animals is it possible. Find out about cognitive capacities of animals. Resolve behaviourist vs. innatist debate (do we learn lang. from environment or is it innate knowledge) Data/research quality issues: researchers not fluent in asl, no way to double check data (in scientific way) Interpretation issues: meaning of multi-word signs (just observation at same time, or actual phrase?) Word chains (learns phrase from human, repeats) Human-like syntax (lack of: mlu (mean length of utterance) eg. babies start w 1 utterance at a time. Kinds of experiments that may be more informative. Controlled experiments on learning narrower sets of structures, rather than entire language. Learning string sets of various degrees of complexity. Learning made up language and analyzing that.
