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.

[smchris]

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.

Re:Wow, is this overstated.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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]

A draft of the actual article is at:

http://adendress.googlepages.com/endress-affixation.pdf

The experiment did not proceed as you indicated (I'm not criticizing you, I had to go to find the draft to determine this). The monkeys were presented with a "familiarization" stage that consisted of ~30 minutes of "words" where "shoy" was either always a prefix or always a suffix (depending on condition) to one set A of stem syllables, then were presented with a "test" stage where they heard "shoy" sometimes as a prefix and sometimes as a suffix on a different set B of stem syllables. They found that monkeys who had heard "shoy" as a prefix in the familiarization stage looked at the speaker longer after hearing test items that had "shoy" as a suffix (as compared to test items that had "shoy" as a prefix), and that those who had heard "shoy" as a suffix in familiarization looked at the speaker longer after hearing test items with "shoy" as a prefix.

They do seem to have shown that the monkeys can do some sort of abstraction when performing this "shoy-first or shoy-last" sequence analysis. None of the test items ever appeared in the familiarization stage (since the stem syllables of familiarization were different from those of test), so they aren't simply indicating whether they've heard that particular sound file or not. It's also interesting that they could do this in the face of (some) talker variation (due to sex and other factors), as more than one talker was used to produce stimulus materials.

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)

And yes, I Am A Linguist.

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:Wow, is this overstated.

[Anonymous Coward]

Read the original article instead of what gets reported, which might clear up a few things. You can find it at http://adendress.googlepages.com/endress-affixation.pdf

In language, sequence onsets and sequence ends are extremely important. For example, in many languages, you have prefixes or suffixes, but infixes (e.g., fun-fucking-tastic) are exceedingly rare. Likewise, stress is always located relative to the first syllable of some unit or relative to the last syllable. (Stress is the difference in pronunciation between 'record' used as a noun, and 'record' used as a verb.) And you find much more abstract regularities like this.

There might be a simple reason for this pattern: it's easier to track the first and the last position than any other position. For example, when you hear the sequence XNVSUCYPL, you know that X came first, L came last, but probably not that S was in the fourth position, although you might know that it was in the first half of the string. The same is true for pretty much any animal that has been tested: it's easier to track edge positions than middle positions.

If the observation that sequence edges are important in language has anything to do with the observation that sequence edges are particularly easy to track for memory mechanisms, then there is one crucial prediction: nonhuman animals (who can track edge positions) should learn open-ended ordering regularities based on the first and the last position. That is, they should match regular expressions like /^shoy.+/ and /.+shoy$/ - even when, and that's the crucial part, they have never heard the items before. So they have to generalize the regularity to arbitrary, novel strings - as long as shoy comes first or last.

The results show that the monkeys can learn such open-ended ordering regularities. And while that's obviously not all it takes to build a language, ordering regularities are *one* crucial aspect, as "John kicks Mary" isn't the same thing as "Mary kicks John". So the basic ability to learn such ordering relations is present in cotton-top tamarins, but they obviously don't use it for anything linguistic. Conversely, we might find all these edge-based regularities in language because we inherited (memory) mechanisms from our common ancestors that are particularly good at tracking stuff in edge positions, and humans might have recycled these mechanisms for linguistic purposes. In sum, this is not a piece about the evolution of language, but rather a piece about the evolution of a very specific aspect of what gets used in language. But because it's so pedestrian you can actually test it experimentally.

And yes, I'm one of the authors.

Re:Wow, is this overstated.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

foo != oof

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Re:foo != oof

[Anonymous Coward]

Not surprisingly, animals can tell when a fricative (and vowel) followed by a plosive (and vowel) change place.

For those unfamiliar with these terms, let me demonstrate them in a sentence for you: 'The new Transformers movie was frican plosive.'

Ya, so...

[Q-Hack!]

My dog can understand about 20 words. Nothing new here.

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?

Re:Ya, so...

[Arker]

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."

This is not really true. Word order is a critical part of some languages (Modern English, for example, although Cantonese would be an even more apt example.) But in other languages it is not. In a highly inflected language (classical Latin being the example the reader is most likely to be exposed to I suppose) word order can be disregarded entirely.

For example, "puer puellam amat" the boy loves the girl "puerum puella amat" the girl loves the boy. But all I changed was a couple of suffixes, the word order stays the same.

No need to worry, yet...

[retech]

The moment they react to: "Get your stinkin' paws off me you damn dirty ape." Then we need to panic.

Hypothesis Hand Waving

[DynaSoar]

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.

Re:

[bsDaemon]

That's a not-too-modest proposal you have there...

!nonsense

[Spy Handler]

Sho Yi Bi is a real word in a Chinese dialect.... so what they really heard was,

"nonsense nonsense nonsense hotmonkeysex"

Re:The Look

[fractoid]

Oh, we understand "the look" alright. It means "I'm angry, possibly not even at you, and it's likely you have no idea who did what wrong to make me this way, but you will pay. If I'm particularly clever I might even make you believe it's your fault." The lack of further information and the subsequent worry on your part is an intended effect.