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Monkeys Show Language Recognition
mmmscience writes "The cotton-top tamarin monkeys can apparently tell the difference between suffixes and prefixes. They will turn to face the direction of recorded words when they hear the nonsense syllables "bi-shoy" change to "shoy-bi." The lead author, Ansgar Endress, suggests that this is just like how human infants learn language, by tracking the beginning and ends of words."
So, monkeys turn their heads if, in a string of patterns, an entity is repeated.
"bi-shoy-bi-shoy-bi-shoy-bi-shoy-shoy-bi"
Not related to suffixes or prefixes at all.
Not surprisingly, animals can tell when a fricative (and vowel) followed by a plosive (and vowel) change place.
In other words, animals hear things that aren't the same as different.
I must say that this is quite... significant... that it made it to the front page. If only!
In Bengali it means 'subject'. I doubt that this has ANYTHING to do with language, but is rather an oddball effect.
My dog can understand about 20 words. Nothing new here.
Some days I get the sinking feeling Orwell was an optimist.
if you rtfa, they actually just say that the monkeys can track the order of the syllables, and that this is something infants have to do too.
Ohhh, no! That means monkeys are as smart as babies! Are we supposed to stop eating them in our hamburgers and 'meat product' now?
Which ones: babies or monkeys?
Truth, Justice. Or the American Way.
The monkeys or the babies?
The moment they react to: "Get your stinkin' paws off me you damn dirty ape." Then we need to panic.
Depends on which you think is tastier.
Most any animal will orient to a novel stimulus. When they are repeatedly presented with a stimulus comprised of some stimulus components in a certain order they will habituate to that stimulus. When they are then presented with a stimulus comprised of the same components in a different order, they will react as if it is novel. Simply said, they can tell then difference, and that's all that need be said. In EEG research we study this a great deal using such habituated and novel stimuli composed from pairs of beeps of the same or different frequencies, pairs of clicks or tones that differ in temporal spacing by as little as 10%, pairs or trains of tones that are either increasing or decreasing in pitch or in volume, the list in huge. The evoked brain signal we study in these designs is called the mis-match negativity (MMN). Brains are so hard wired to detect all manner of differences like that that the design and analysis of the MMN has been used for clinical testing to tell for instance coma from vegetative state. It is of absolutely no import that the stimulus happens to be what we would call syllables. I have no doubt that I could replicate the study with humans listening to monkeys screeches chopped up and pasted together different ways and get the same result. But I wouldn't have the audacity to suggest that those results signified that humans were predisposed to understand monkey 'language'.
Fact is, I would make just that assertion bilaterally. But I most certainly wouldn't do it with the given stimulus and testing design.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
That's a not-too-modest proposal you have there...
Few will get this, sadly. damn funny though.
Sho Yi Bi is a real word in a Chinese dialect.... so what they really heard was,
"nonsense nonsense nonsense hotmonkeysex"
"The cotton-top tamarin monkeys can apparently tell the difference between suffixes and prefixes..."
Now if only Slashdot editors could achieve this level of language skill & comprehension...
[sigh]
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
"Hmm It's all Chinese to me, here you read."
Take what ye can. Give nothing back!
Try issuing garbled commands to a dog. I haven't done it but I'd wager good money you could teach a dog to do two different things by reversing the syllables. The dog just hears different commands.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Now if you could teach men to understand the meaning transmitted in "the look" directed at him from his wife, then you'd be somewhere.
I think my dog understands the meaning, but he either can not or will not communicate the meaning of "the look" to me. It would likely involve tearing my face off.
- High Tech workers, please say NO to Union Carpenters, their Union sees fit to control our compensation.
They don't need to get it these days, we don't have any problems with potato blight. :P
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
In other news apparently some species of bullfrogs have neurons that can identify the size of another, near by bullfrog by the sound it makes when it belly flops into the pond. Extrapolating from specific activity to broad claims of a nonhuman speech faculty is just good, old idle gossip. I think Steven Pinker's, now dated book, "The Language Instinct" still provides a pretty good but damning critique of the business gleaned from monkey talk. Although I always feel sympathy for scientists whose works are summarized for popular consumption and most likely badly served in the process. We're the only species with true language faculties and the only species that makes use of complex symbolic communication. Terrance Deacon's book, "The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain", is an excellent read in this area.
ideopath @ play
... I know of several monkeys that recognize languages. Nothing much can be said about them though.
Usually they're just called "code monkeys".
They usually adapt to VB quite well. Or so they think.
+5 funny!!! lol! stoopid monkeys! :)
(i like monkeys, i got 200 for a nickel a piece!)
When I read papers about animals and language, I get the idea that the science is weak. Also, when I read Slashdot stories, I get the idea that the language skills of Slashdot editors are weak.
The Slashdot story quotes the Examiner, which in turn quotes this Discovery article: Monkeys Display Verbal Skills Quote: "... a response previously determined to indicate their acknowledgment that the familiar sound ordering pattern had been violated".
This BBC article is a better discussion: Monkeys recognise 'bad grammar'. Quote: ' "Simple temporal ordering is shared with non-human animals," he said. '. My impression is that the researchers are claiming something different than they actually have shown to be true. And, of course, the articles about their work are even more exaggerated.
The abstract in Biology Letters gives some useful information: Evidence of an evolutionary precursor to human language affixation in a non-human primate.
Or nukular and nuclear, for that matter...
OP was modded flamebait, but I merely aim to prove that bad grammar crosses all racial boundaries...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
'... "no" less than perfectly'
LOL. Gordie the cat understands "no" perfectly, I'm guessing. He just doesn't agree.
This seems insightful to me: 'There is the larger question of what it _means_ to "understand" language of course -- and, for that matter, how often humans typically first "understand" the philosophical depth of an utterance before they then respond to it. That's a whole 'nother game.'
I often get the impression that the science of language isn't really science yet.
Dont they already have monkeys communicating in sign language? and i can get a dog/cat/cow to come when its name is called so why not a monkey?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Some years ago back when The Far Side was still in production, I remember one cartoon that showed some scientists around a blackboard with a tank nearby that had dolphins in it. One of the scientists said "There's another one of those aw-blah es-pan-yol sounds" and he was about to put another mark next to "aw-blah es-pan-yol" on the blackboard. Of course "shoy bi" (in whatever direction) could mean something in a non-English language, but to be fair, that doesn't necessarily mean that the monkeys understand that language. I'm not sure that this "experiment" really accomplished anything as the ability of these monkeys to, in theory, differentiate prefixes may have nothing at all to do with how human infants accomplish the same thing. Wow, that was some really useful research there. I can't wait for their next report that shows that monkeys have been known to eat food every day and they have periods of inactivity every day where for hours they seem to be unconscious.
Well...at least, he learned to recognize the sounds "Bee A Tee Aitch" :)