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."

Comments

Wow, is this overstated.

[The_mad_linguist]

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.

Re:Wow, is this overstated.

[MightyMartian]

Perhaps you'd be better served actually getting what scientists think from scientists, rather than science journalism. Linguists, especially those researching the origins of language, are rather careful to delineate other forms of animal communication from language, because that's rather the whole point of the exercise. Any animal with sufficient neural complexity and an operating auditory nerve can be taught some sort of verbal commands. But when we analyze, for instance, the way chimps can be taught something that seems rather akin to a proto-language, we're talking about a considerably more complex phenomena than "din din!"

Re:Wow, is this overstated.

[jpate]

Right. Communication and language are different things. In language, meaningful units (whether you want to say "words" are the basic meaningful units or whatever) can be combined in ways that have never been heard before to produce astronomically huge numbers of new meanings. Communication, on the other hand, usually consists of a fairly straightforward and small mapping of signals to meanings.

Re:Ya, so...

[im_thatoneguy]

Your dog would need to learn an infinite number of words to qualify for this research.

($phoneticstring + "bi") != ("bi" + $phoneticstring)

Your dog listens to your commands much like the classic Farside "Blah blah blah blah rex blah blah blah sit".

The ordering of your commands is unimportant.

The monkeys are able on the other hand to break apart components of a word and find meaning in the placement itself. And not just previously learned sequences either. Meaning from syllabic placement is a more advanced ability than meaning from a syllable. This is pretty critical to language development where word ordering is important to meaning. "The monkey at the banana." vs "The banana ate the monkey."

Re:Ya, so...

[Strange Ranger]

I find it interesting how well dogs are able to understand tone of voice. My dog understands the tone of my voice at least as well as my wife and kids.

I'd be surprised to learn a monkey could do that.

For instance I could say "vegetable" or "spaceship" in the right tone of voice and my dog would react perfectly to the tone and completely ignore the actual word meaning. He even knows when he wants a treat, if I raise my eyebrows at him and give him a look that I expect him to sit. I don't think he's unique among dogs. I do think that in some ways dogs are probably smarter than monkeys. And possible my neighbors.

Hmmm.. so how important is tone of voice in linguistics and language development? More or less important than word order?