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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.
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.