Animal cognition

We gave an overview of the cognitive language-related abilities that have been found in animals. We saw, for example, that a non-primate, the grey parrot (Psittacus erithacus) Alex can identify about 50 different objects using English labels. He can also label seven colors, five shapes, and quantities up to and including six, and he has functional use of phrases like ‘I want X’ and ‘I want to go Y’, where X and Y, respectively, are object or location labels. He combines these labels to identify, refuse, request, and categorize more than a hundred different items. He is said to have concepts of sameness and difference, of bigger and smaller, of absence of information, and of number. Thus, even in non-primates there are a number of properties having analogs—conceivably also homologs—in human languages.

But there is one clear difference. In their survey of animal communication systems, Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch (2002) did not find any evidence for recursive embedding. And, working with cotton-top tamarin monkeys (Saguinus oedipus), Fitch and Hauser (2004) arrive at the same conclusion. They tested the animals on their abilities vis-a `-vis two grammatical models, namely finite state grammar, taking the form (AB)n, and phrase structure grammar (AⁿBⁿ). Whereas the latter can embed strings within other strings, thus producing center-embedded hierarchical structures (‘‘phrase structures’’: AAA–BBB...) and long-distance dependencies, the former model cannot (producing AB–AB–AB...). These authors conclude that, unlike humans, tamarins cannot handle phrase structure grammar, suffering ‘‘from a specific and fundamental computational limitation on their ability to spontaneously recognize or remember hierarchically organized acoustic structures,’’ and they speculate that the acquisition of hierarchical processing ability may have represented a critical juncture in the evolution of the human language faculty (Fitch and Hauser 2004: 380).

This claim has not gone unchallenged. Kochanski (2004) suggests that the conclusion reached by these authors needs to be taken with care. He argues that if humans can learn patterns of (meaningless) syllable sequences of the form AABB, or AAABBB, whereas tamarin monkeys can not, then this does not tell much about how these two groups process the sequences, that is, whether both use the same cognitive technique in tackling this task—in other words, Kochanski doubts whether this is really a meaningful comparison to establish a difference between humans and animals. For example, rather than relying on recursive mental structures, the human subjects could have determined the ‘‘grammaticality’’ of the stimuli by simply counting and comparing the number of syllables of type A and type B and checking that the numbers match.

Still, our observations on animal behavior confirm the conclusion reached by Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch (2002): In spite of all the intense training that some animals received, none of them showed the ability to understand or produce structures that could in any sense be called recursive (but see Pepperberg 1992; 1999b for a different view). Some animals arguably have recursion in the form of iteration (see (7b)); for example, the songs of male humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae), commonly described as courtship signals, are usually sung in repetition, often for half an hour or more, and repetition appears to be communicatively significant: The more repetitions, the greater the desire of the male to attract a female, and the more it demonstrates the male’s physical fitness. But irrespective of how this situation is to be accounted for, our concern here is not with iteration but rather with embedding recursion.

It would seem, however, that there is another way to approach this issue. One prerequisite for recursion—we argue—consists of the ability to form abstract concepts. That at least some animals are capable of abstraction has been pointed out independently in a number of studies; Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch (2002: 1575), for example, note that animals use a wide range of abstract concepts, including tool, color, geometric relations, food, and number.

But abstraction on its own is not sufficient. We noted that what is required for noun phrase recursion as a syntactic mechanism to arise is, first, the cognitive ability to understand asymmetric relations of dominance between objects, as they hold, for example, between inclusive (tree) and less inclusive items (apple tree), between wholes (finger) and their parts (fingernail), between non-possessed (car) and possessive concepts (Anne’s car), between simple objects (book) and spatially defined objects (the book on the table), etc. All languages that we are aware of have ways of expressing such relations in some way or other, be that in the form of compounding, of attributive possessive constructions, or of noun-modifier constructions—hence, in all these languages there is recursion expressed linguistically (see below). But what about animals?

Hurford (2004) describes the problem appropriately thus:

If non-humananimalsknowinsomesensethatthingshavepartsthathavesubparts which have subparts, then again their mental representations, independent of language, have a recursive structure. It is not known whether animals are capable of such mental representations.

If one entertains the hypothesis that recursion evolved to solve other computational problems, such as navigation, number quantification or social relationships, then it is possible that other animals have such abilities. (Hurford 2004: n.p.)

Certainly the way Alex, the grey parrot, combined ‘‘attributes’’ with ‘‘nouns’’ as in rose paper or rock corn might point to the presence of a modifier–head construction, hence of a simple recursive structure [[B] A] in accordance with rule (1b). However, the data provided by Pepperberg (e.g. 1999a) are not sufficient to compellingly demonstrate that such a construction really exists. Nevertheless, there is more convincing evidence from some non-human primates. We argued that some chimpanzees can be said to have acquired some basics of conceptual inclusion and perhaps also of part–whole relations. Remember the ability of the chimpanzees Sherman and Austin to label the hypernyms ‘food’ and ‘tool’ and to assign, respectively, food items and tool items to these two categories (Savage-Rumbaugh et al. 1980: 924), or of the chimpanzees Peony and Elizabeth, who could sort the plant parts leaves, stems, seeds, and flowers to a plant category, and the animal parts fur, teeth, hair, and bones to an animal category (Premack1976: 217–18), thereby showing some taxonomic understanding of a part–whole relationship. One may also wish to draw attention to the following observation, which might be suggestive of a hierarchical social relationship:

Baboons classify themselves and their conspecifics both in a linear hierarchy of dominance, and in matrilineal kin groups. In other words, they are capable of forming conceptual structures such as [X is mother of Y [who is mother of Z [who is mother of me]]] or [X is more dominant than Y [who is more dominant than Z [who is more dominant than me]]]—tail-recursively embedded associations, which (unlike the iterative counterparts) cannot be re-ordered while maintaining the correct relations. (Parker 2005: 5)

Accordingly, there is reason to assume that while these animals do not clearly have (embedding) recursion of any kind, they appear to dispose of one important prerequisite for the rise of recursion in the noun phrase, namely the cognitive ability to establish a hierarchical relationship between inclusive and included objects or between social roles.

In fact, a number of traits in animal behavior have been reported that— given appropriate experimental testing—might turn out to be conducive to an interpretation in terms of simple recursion. Possible cases are provided, for example, by the food preparation techniques of mountain gorillas, which could be suggestive of hierarchical reasoning (Parker 2005).

اخر الاخبار

اخبار العتبة العباسية المقدسة

العتبة العباسية المقدسة تسدل الستار على الختمة القرآنية الرمضانية المركزية المرتّلة

العتبة العباسية المقدسة تنظم برنامجًا ثقافيًّا لوفد من الطلبة العرب والأجانب في جامعة النهرين

شعبة الخطابة النسوية تختتم برنامجها الرمضاني (قوارير في ضيافة الله)

العتبة العباسية المقدسة تكرم الفائزين في مسابقات ملتقى النورين الخامس والمساهمين في إنجاح فعالياته

المزيد

الآخبار الصحية

كوب قبل النوم.. مشروب طبيعي يحارب الأرق

دون أدوية.. طريقة طبيعية لخفض ضغط الدم بفعالية مذهلة

المعكرونة ليست عدوك.. كيف تصبح جزءا من وجبة صحية متوازنة؟

دراسة: تناول القهوة يوميا يخفض خطر الإصابة بالاضطرابات النفسية

المزيد

الآخبار التكنلوجية

علماء روس يخططون لبناء منشأة للكشف عن المادة المظلمة

ثاني أكسيد الكربون ليس تهديدا للمناخ فقط.. بل لصحة الإنسان أيضا!

ديدان الأرض تكشف تلوث التربة بالمعادن الثقيلة

خبير أرصاد جوية: ظاهرة النينيو القادمة قد تكون الأقوى خلال 10 سنوات

المزيد

مواضيع ذات صلة

On the rise of recursion Discussion

Are there languages without recursion?

Treatment of recursion in linguistic description

Embedding, iteration, and succession

Simple vs. productive recursion

Manifestations

What is recursion? A definition

What is recursion?

On the rise of recursion

Case study: be going to

The subjectification approach

Case study: the evolution of must