Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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!"
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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."
The moment they react to: "Get your stinkin' paws off me you damn dirty ape." Then we need to panic.
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.
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.