Slashdot Mirror
Can Communications Be Learned From Chimps?
Pine UK writes "The Zoological Society of London are looking for volunteers who are willing to 'talk chimp' in everyday life. The ZSL will be studying the volunteers to see how talking chimp affects situations like workplace conflicts. According to BBC News, the volunteers are expected to show their emotions in a chimp like fashion. This can be done by baring their teeth and by using submissive body language such as lowering their heads and crouching. The ZSL will publish their findings later this year."
In a word, yes, but headline has been changed to stop inevitable 50-post grammar dissection (or.. has it?)
It's the British version of the American past-tense "learned."
So now you've learnt something new for today...
Dung throwing is chimp for "I respect your leadership"
Just FYI, there is a web site devote to feral children.
|>oug
[S]ome human languages (Navaho is one IIRC) involve phonemes that must be learned in infancy - if one doesn't hear these sounds while the brain is plastic, one never can learn these sounds.
Actually, all human languages use some phonemes that don't have precise correspondents in other languages. basically, if your language doesn't use a particular phoneme, you cease (after about the age of three or four months) to "gear" it -- instead you categorize it as the phoneme in your language it is "closest" too. Indeed, studies show that the brain does less work when heard sounds are closest to the learned stereotype, and more work for ambiguous sounds that "straddle" two or more known phonemes. So bigger "gaps" between "adjacent" phonemes are preferred.
This makes all kinds of sense by the way: diff'rint pee-pulp sow-nd diff-or-int, and their voices differ based on mood, emotion, wakefulness. By having broad categories for phonemes (and by using contextual clues, which is outside the scope of this discussion), you're able to understand a tired, gum-chewing tourist who doesn't share your dialect. Having to understand indistinct and potentially ambiguous utterances in your language happens much more often than attempting to learn a wholly foreign language. The human brain is adapted to "latch onto" the language it hears in infancy, and specialize in that -- and most times -- in the six million years of human evolution --, that's been the best utilization of resources.
But while adults might not be able to distinguish non-native phonemes sounds by ear, they can by oscilloscope.
The more parsimonious conclusion is that chimps don't have language -- at least not like humans do.
Do they have vocalizations? Sure. Can those vocalizations mean things? Sure -- it's not news that various species of monkeys use different vocalizations to warn of different predators. And it's known that, like human babies differentiating phonemes, juvenile monkeys must learn the meanings of those vocalizations. We even have recent evidence that some birds can understand those monkey vocalizations -- and ignore those warning of predators that don't threaten the birds.
But language is not just the vocalization of unconnected nouns: "eagle!" or "leopard!"; language, as we understand it in humans, allows far more nuanced and precise explanation than anything we se in animals. At the most mundane level, as Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom point out "It makes a big difference whether a far-off region is reached by taking the trail that is in front of the large tree or the trail that the large tree is in front of." At a more sublime level, a series of unconnected nouns hasn't the power that Dante Alighieri's verse has, to make alive again in our minds his love Beatrice.
Don't misunderstand me: I agree that chimps have a social life -- a complex social life, and I accept the more controversial opinion that they have a culture, and that they transmit that culture.
But language is something else, a special "trick", and it goes beyond, and indeed doesn't require vocalization at all -- as a deaf person or for that matter, any post written on Slashdot will demonstrate.
If we aren't "hearing" language from chimps -- and we've been hoping and listening for years -- it's most likely because chimps don't have language -- at least in the sense we mean language when we describe what any normal human three-year old can do.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
Unlike the chimpanzees, whose behaviour consists of aggression, threats, and chest-thumping I-am-da-alpha-male etc attitudes, bonobos resolve conflicts by cuddling up to each other and having snuggly therapeutic sex. Sometimes the whole troupe gets into it.
Nothing like an orgy to defuse aggression.
So, if it were bonobo behaviour the study was emulating, I would leap into my monkey suit and sign up right away - wild monkey sex was after all the stuff of my schoolboy fantasies.