Human Language and Animal communication Is Still controversial debate Today.Language is what makes us human, and we all seem to be naturally curious about it.We do much more than just communicate with language: we play games with it we can think, understand, feel, and talk with language.
But there is the most interesting question:
Does my dog really understand what I’m saying?
Zoologist Karl von Frisch (1967), in a series of well-known studies, found that honeybees appear to have displacement; by performing a “dance”, they are able to communicate to their hive mates how to get to the pollinating flowers. And some bird songs seem to have some degree of duality of patterning. Discrete pieces of song may be combined in different ways to indicate distinct meanings. The communication systems of many primates, birds, bees, and cetaceans have all been studied extensively. Though they are amazingly sophisticated, intricate, and fascinating systems, and though there is still much to be learned about them, they all lack some of the design features of human language.
Can Other Animals Learn Language?
Whether animals can learn language is a question separate from whether animals have humanlike communication systems. Numerous researchers have attempted to teach intelligent apes various systems of communication, with the goal of enabling the apes to use those systems to communicate with humans and with each other.These attempts have had varying degrees of success, but each offers insights into the learning capacity of these primates as well as into some of their limitations.
Facts You Must Know About Human Language And Animal Communication System
The question of whether chimpanzees or gorillas have the same mental capacity as humans to learn language is difficult to answer. For one thing, primates lack the same vocal apparatus as humans, so they must be taught language in another modality, or means by which language is produced. Some have been taught to manipulate symbols of some kind; others have been taught manual signs. Such research requires experiments designed to measure, for example, whether a primate understands of a word or symbol is comparable to a human’s.
Yet another issue is the role of the trainer in such experiments; humans acquire language when exposed to it and have no trainers, so how does one measure language learning versus language acquisition?
Experiments that measure language learning in species other than humans are thus extremely difficult to design, and results are hard to observe and measure. Two well-known studies of chimpanzees illustrate some of the complexities involved in this kind of research.
Author BY: Kristen Denham
Difference Between Animal and Human Communication by fatmaakayguder1987
