ANTH 1150 Chapter Notes - Chapter 4: Foxp2, Social Capital, Noam Chomsky

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Language spoken and written is our primary means of communication. Language is based on arbitrary, learned associations between words and the things they stand for. Anthropologists study language in its social and cultural context. Others study linguistic differences to discover patterns. Sociolinguistics examines dialects and styles in a single language to show how speech reflects social differences. The natural communication systems of other primates are call systems. These vocal systems consist of a limited number of sounds that are produced only when particular environmental stimuli are encountered. The number of calls eventually expanded, becoming too great to be transmitted even partly through the genes. The vocal tract of apes is not suitable for speech. The first chimpanzee to learn american sign language was washoe, a female, who died in 2007. Washoe revolutionized the discussion of the language-learning abilities of apes. The chimp gradually acquired a vocabulary of more than 100 signs representing english words.

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