“A Telling Difference”
Animals communicate, but they are unable to emulate human language.
Written by Stephen R. Anderson
Stephen R. Anderson also known as Dorothy R. Diebold is a Professor of Linguistics and psychology who studies also how organisms acquire, recognize, use and manipulate information. He is passionate about a morphology and strongly believes that parts of the words emphasize the relations between the words rather than just parts that make words. Stephen Anderson is very interested in the difference between animal’s communication and unique human ability of a language. He wrote many books and now works in the Yale University being the 83rd president of the Linguistic Society of America. He is a member of the Steve Project (all of the members have the first name Steve) which stands for teaching evolution in schools.
a. Assessing- evaluate.
b. Cognitive- interesting, curious.
c. Putative- assumed.
d. Infinite- endless, unlimited.
e. Arbitrary- random.
The article is mostly related to pages 196- 199 in the book. At the bottom of the page 196 there are four paragraphs about apes and American sign language, examples are provided as well as on pages 197-199 about human and ape language abilities. It was pleasant to read some new examples which are not used in the article and are presented in a neutral point of view. I found it really impressive that the chimpanzee did learn pretty much of the official sign language and showed good results in using it.
Prior to reading the book and the article I had never heard that apes are able to communicate with people using sign languages. All of the information given in the article and a book was completely new to me. I found out about a few experiments with apes using a sign language like- Koko, Kanzi, Washoe and others. All of them were using different types of sign language: ASL, specially made for them sign language and a keyboard communication.
1. Animals do communicate, however their style of communication is not only different from ours, their vocabulary has much less words than human language does and they are unable to communicate on such a high level as humans do.
2. Animals cannot communicate about the past or the future, plan something or think outside of the box.
3. Animals do not use and are not able to understand grammar and they do not distinguish words like in, on, above, below and etc.
The article shouts out loud that human language is the unique and complicated structure of grammar and syntax that cannot be used by an animal.
The article was mostly easy to understand. Even though there were some jokes that made me smile I found it hard to read because of the writer’s stubbornness and not willingness to admire incredible achievements of scientist’s and ape’s achievements in communication.
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