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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."
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!
Yup, that's point one. On the other hand, I'm also tired of, "Not that the scientists are suggesting that the monkeys actually understand language." By his actions, my cat understands "tuna time!", "Out for Gordie!", "No!", "Good Boy!", "cuddle?", and "come on!" -- "no" less than perfectly.
Many scientists have to get over _their_ blinders that comprehension _must_ imply anthropomorphism. I'm perfectly happy assuming my cat is an alien consciousness. That this alien consciousness can respond appropriately in varied, real world situations to some of my utterances should be doubly interesting to consciousness studies.
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.
My dog can understand about 20 words. Nothing new here.
Some days I get the sinking feeling Orwell was an optimist.
I think it's a bit of a stretch to use the words prefix and suffix also. What I find interesting is the the monkeys react, with no specialized training, to differences in recordings. Not only that, but they turn to look at the person who is playing back the recordings rather than looking at, say, the speaker.
A really hot strain of research right now is trying to prove the evolutionary foundations through which humans developed language. A big part of that is being able to recognize differences in sound, particularly "speech" (even nonsense syllables), and show that the animals have the ability to recognize the differences.
While this certainly isn't groundbreaking research, it IS interesting.
fyi, I'm currently doing research through a university with something kind of similar, working with bonobo apes (aka pygmy chimpanzees). One of our main goals is to help develop an idea of how human ancestors may have begun to develop language.
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
A draft of the actual article is at:
I'm not sure if they can really make any claims about how humans learn language though. Aside from how unnatural the stimulus materials are (each syllable of the two-syllable words was producedy by a different talker), their conclusions are that... kids pay attention to the order of when they hear things? We already knew that and more from e.g. Saffran et al. (1996). I'd like to see them do some variation of that artificial language study with their monkeys and see if the monkeys will do two levels of distributional analysis (word segmentation and morpheme segmentation)
That has been done: Cotton-top tamarins (Hauser et al., 2001) and rats (Toro & Trobalón, 2005) can do the Saffran-type statistical computations. However, in contrast to what Saffran et al. claim, this type of computations cannot be used at all for learning words from fluent speech; if you give learners just the Saffran-type statistical cues, you can play 6 words in a loop for 600 times, and people don't remember any words at all (Endress & Mehler, 2009). Apparently, the Saffran-kind of statistics lead to a very different kind of memory encoding than what is used for encoding actual words, and is actually also a different mechanism from the one the tamarins used in our experiment.