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Universität Paderborn

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Animal Communication

The ability of animals to communicate with each others and with humans held great interest for many years, because language and communication are often seen as the key to the mentality of both: humans and nonhumans. The assumption of animal mentality supports the idea of comparability of human and nonhuman intellectual capacities.

The idea behind this is: If we can understand how we can communicate with animals, we will be able to understand intellectual capacity of both: humans and animals.

The first attempts to train apes to use a natural human language started in 1968. One of the first and perhaps the most noted research efforts was achieved by Kellogg & Kellogg.

Dr. Kellogg and his wife tried to teach chimpanzees spoken English. These attempts were unsuccessful. Chimpanzees are not able to speak English, because their vocal organs are too different from human vocal organs.

The result vocal tract changes in evolution is to make it possible for our tongue to move forward and back, up and down, in a way that creates resonant cavities of different sizes in various places in the vocal tract.

These changes are important to form a wide variety of different vowels and consonants.

In 1972, scientists tried another teaching method to teach chimpanzees a human language: The American Sign Language (ASL).

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1.      It is a language with fluent users because it is the visual language of thousands of deaf people in the United States.

2.      Chimpanzees are able to form the signs of ASL.

The experiment of Dr. Kellogg was still the basic work for other research programs in the 80`s and 90`s. It is characterized by several features:

1.      It proceeds on the assumption that the most appropriate linguistic medium for the experiments is a language in every day use among humans.

2.      It assumes that the appropriate learning environment for the primate subjects is comparable to the natural home environment in which children acquire language.

3.      The primary objective is the comparative psychological study of the cognitive development of human and nonhuman primates

The scientist Herbert Terrace underlines the ethical status of nonhuman primates and the moral agency of training primates a human language. Motivating to these discussions are the assumption of human uniqueness and the contribution of the human use of language to this uniqueness.

Dr. William Stokoe, who is a scholar of American Sign Language, argues that the studies help to understand the symbolic communication of animals and that therefore the studies contribute to the development of the science of semiotics:

The study of how meaning is constructed and understood and it can be divided into three branches:

  • Semantics: Relation between signs and the things they refer to, their denotata.
  • Syntactics: Relation of signs to each other in formal structures.
  • Pragmatics: Relation of signs to their impacts on those who use them. (Also known as General Semantics)


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