Some cognitive abilities of animals

Introduction

Opinion on what typical human language abilities are differs greatly depending on which theoretical stance one wishes to adopt. Work on generative grammar, for example, has focused on specific syntactic features that are taken to be characteristic of human languages, such as long-distance dependencies, binding, movement/displacement, or recursion, while other linguistic schools highlight semantic or discourse-pragmatic properties to be observed in languages. We will use ‘‘language’’ in a more general sense—one that also incorporates restricted linguistic systems arising in special situations. Accordingly, our interest will be with features that can be expected to be present in any kind of linguistic system and we will ignore features that characterize only specific (‘‘fully-fledged’’) varieties of human languages.

Our discussion has to be taken with care, for a number of reasons. First, research on animal cognition and communication is an area of much ongoing research; we now know a lot more than we did ten years ago.

Quite conceivably, our understanding of this issue might change again in the years to come on account of new research findings. Second, the question of how observations on animal behavior are to be interpreted differs greatly from one author to another. Differences are found depending on whether authors report about their own findings or whether other authors comment these findings. They are also found between authors analyzing the same animals. After having studied Washoe and other chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), the Gardners (e.g. Gardner and Gardner 1969, 1975, 1978) and Fouts and Mills (1997) concluded that these apes had acquired a wide range of signs, including signs for objects, actions, names, locations, qualities, etc., and patterns of combinations of signs, such as [agent + object], [agent + action], and [attribute + object], and that they exhibited a range of different communicative motivations. The same animals were later analyzed by Rivas (2005) on the basis of videotaped material,¹ and he found only few of the achievements in these animals that earlier authors had described. For example, the chimpanzee Loulis had been reported to have acquired at least fifty-one signs from the other chimpanzees (e.g. Fouts and Mills 1997) while Rivas found this chimpanzee to produce no more than four signs (see also Terrace 1979, 1985; Seidenberg 1986).

Third, the findings that are available are the result of a variety of different research designs. At one end there are findings gained by observing animals in their natural environment, for example in the rainforest of the Ivory Coast or the savannahs of East Africa; at the other end there are findings gained in laboratory situations involving intense training and social interaction between human caretakers and the animals. In accordance with the way they were gathered, these findings may carry quite different weight. For example, the chimpanzee Washoe studied by the Gardners (Gardner and Gardner 1969) exhibited only minimal syntactic abilities compared to the chimpanzees studied by Premack (1971), and McNeill (1974) suggests that this can be accounted for by the fact that the authors concerned used contrasting techniques of training and interaction with the animals. The study by Savage-Rumbaugh et al. (1980: 922–4) also reveals that the extent to which non-human primates can develop concepts is contingent upon how they are trained. The training of their chimpanzees Sherman and Austin emphasized the pragmatic and semantic functions of form–meaning pairings, and Savage-Rumbaugh and colleagues suggest that Sherman’s and Austin’s training led them to link the use of an object and the label of an object together. For the chimpanzee Lana on the other hand, who had initially been trained mainly specific paired-associative responses, the two skills appeared to remain separate, and Lana did not acquire the concepts concerned.

That the extent to which animals acquire communicative and linguistic skills is contingent on the kind of training method employed has also been demonstrated by Miles (1983). For the present purposes, however, we will ignore such differences, our interest being exclusively with what abilities animals exhibit, irrespective of where and how they acquired these abilities. We are also not interested in the learning abilities of animals; rather, we want to find out the communicative capacities that these animals can be assumed to have, irrespective of how they may have been acquired.

Another issue that we are also not able to do justice to is what kind of intelligence or knowledge systems are available to animals: Do animals discriminate on the basis of stimulus generalization (from specific exemplars and their features) or of concept formation? Are they restricted to ‘‘implicit intelligence’’, that is, to practical, sensorimotor, or situational knowledge, or do they have, or can they acquire ‘‘explicit intelligence’’, that is, conceptual, representative, or discursive knowledge? While we will discuss a number of findings that have some bearing on this issue.

A number of other problems will also be largely ignored, although they must have some bearing on the findings reported. One such issue concerns the difference between comprehension and production: To what extent are there correlations between the two? Which precedes which in the acquisition process? The research findings that are available show that the two need not go together, and which comes first depends in particular on the training techniques applied and the kind of animals studied (Herman 1987; Pepperberg 1999b: 126). For example, work on marine animals such as dolphins and sea lions has focused on comprehension, while that on primate behavior has emphasized production.

Another problem concerns the question of how the training of animals compares to the learning process of children. To what extent is the fact that animals can be trained to acquire characteristics of word order comparable to the way children learn word order via observational learning? What effects does training have on the cognitive abilities of animals? Kako (1999: 12) observes that Alex and the dolphins had to be prodded and cajoled into syntactic competence, and, although the bonobo Kanzi acquired both Yerkish (named after the Yerkes Laboratories of Primate Biology at Orange Park, Florida) and English without intensive training, his competence in both systems never exceeded that of an average2-year-old child. In comparing linguistic performance of animals with that of children, the researcher is confronted in particular with the problem that young children learn to understand the communicative intentions of other persons, while this does not appear to be the case with apes or other non-human animals (but see Tomasello, Call, and Gluckman 1997: 1067). Since our concern is with achievements rather than with the way these achievements are arrived at, we will have little to say on this issue; and more generally, we will not attempt to compare the behavior of animals with that of children in the process of first language acquisition—in spite of the fact that this has been a major theme in previous works on animal communication.

The animals that have been the target of detailed study based on intense training are of various kinds. They include non-human primates, such as Washoe and other chimpanzees (Gardner and Gardner 1969, 1978), Sarah and three other African-born chimpanzees studied by Premack (e.g. 1976), Kanzi, the bonobo (Pan paniscus) studied by Savage-Rumbaugh and her associates (e.g. Savage-Rumbaugh and Lewin 1994), Koko, the lowland gorilla of Patterson (1978a, 1978b), or Chantek, the orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus) studied by Miles (1978, 1983); there are also non-primates, such as bottle-nosed dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) (e.g. Herman 1987), Californian sea lions (Zalophus californianus) (e.g. Schusterman and Gisiner 1988), or Alex, the African grey parrot (Psittacus erithacus) (e.g. Pepperberg 1999b).

And the techniques to establish communication with the animals also differ greatly from one researcher to another. For example, the Gardners (1969) taught the chimpanzee Washoe American Sign Language (ASL), raising her in an environment like that of a human child, stuffing her living quarters with furniture, a kitchen, bedroom and bathroom, toys, tools, etc., and Washoe’s days were made up of meals, naps, baths, play, schooling, and outings, while the fellow chimpanzee Nim studied by Terrace (1979, 1980, 1983) was exposed to a clearly less luxurious physical and social environment. Premack’s chimpanzees were trained with pieces of plastic, backed with metal adhering to a magnetized slate, each standing for some English word. Kanzi, the pygmy chimpanzee (bonobo; Pan paniscus), on the other hand was exposed without explicit training to the artificial lexigram system Yerkish, and he received a portable, folding posterboard containing printed lexigram symbols (Greenfield and Savage-Rumbaugh 1990).

The communication systems used were frequently designed in accordance with what the researchers concerned considered most appropriate given the general situation and the task facing them. In studying the orangutan Chantek, Miles (1983: 48) decided on a ‘‘pidgin’’ Sign English based on gestural signs of ASL with English word order but with little grammatical morphology; Terrace (1983: 22) and associates also used a kind of ‘‘pidgin’’ sign language with the chimpanzee Nim. An artificial gestural language was used in the study of the two Californian sea lions Rocky and Bucky (e.g. Schusterman and Krieger 1984), and the two female bottle-nosed dolphins studied by Herman(e.g. 1987, 1989) were also taught artificial languages: Phoenix learned an acoustic language using computer generated sounds broadcast into the tank through an underwater speaker, while Ake was taught a ‘‘dolphinized’’ version of a gestural language, where the gestures consisted of movements of a trainer’s arms and hands.

Other animals were studied under their natural behavioral and environmental conditions. A paradigm example is Cheney and Seyfarth (1992), who studied communication among vervet monkeys (Cercopithecus aethiops) over a continuous period of eleven years in Kenya’s Amboseli National Park, and other Cercopithecus species were studied by Zuberbühler (2002; Zuberbühler, Cheney, and Seyfarth 1999: 40) in the rainforest of the Ivory Coast.

¹ This material consisted of recordings of unstructured, relaxed, and naturalistic daily interactions between humans and five chimpanzees, containing altogether 3,448 analyzable utterances (Rivas 2005).

اخر الاخبار

اخبار العتبة العباسية المقدسة

قسم العلاقات العامة ينظّم برنامجًا ثقافيًّا لوفد أكاديمي من جامعة كربلاء

قسم الشؤون الخدمية ينفّذ حملة لتنظيف محيط مرقد أبي الفضل العباس (عليه السلام)

معهد القرآن الكريم النسوي يواصل برنامج الختمات القرآنية الرمضانية

ضمن برنامج يبلغون.. محافظة المثنى تشهد إقامة 8 مجالس قرآنية رمضانية

المزيد

الآخبار الصحية

الماء المملح.. فائدة حقيقية أم "صيحة زائفة"؟

عادة بسيطة تدعم الصحة وتحافظ على الوزن المثالي

الغذاء النباتي يقلل مخاطر السرطان.. مع استثناء مهم

الحليب قليل أم كامل الدسم.. أيهما أفضل؟

المزيد

الآخبار التكنلوجية

أنثروبيك تتحدى البنتاغون.. وترامب يأمر بوقف التعامل معها

ميزة جديدة من "إنستغرام" لحماية المراهقين من الانتحار

الأولى من نوعها.. "تقنية مذهلة" في هاتف سامسونغ الجديد

لماذا تشعر المرأة بالألم أكثر من الرجل؟.. دراسة تجيب

المزيد

مواضيع ذات صلة

What linguistic abilities do animals have?

Some cognitive abilities of animals

The epistemic model

Tense

Mood

The grounding predication: mood and tense

The perfect construction: [have [PERF4 [V]]]

A scenario of evolution

The final stages

The progressive construction: [be1 [-ing [V]]]

The passive construction: [be2 [PERF3 [V]]]

The clausal head