Comparing Human and Animal Communication

Thesis: When comparing the language of humans and animals it is easy to see that humans have a more complex way of speaking. Displacement, productivity, arbitrariness, cultural transmission, and duality are the elements that make human language more complex and greater than that of an animal.

“As in many critical studies of animal learning, the chimpanzees’ behavior is views as a type of conditioned response to cues provided (often unwittingly) by human trainers.” (Yule 15)
- This backs up the point that animals may learn or be conditioned to respond in a way that humans can understand, but it’s not their second nature. If you were to try interacting with a wild chimpanzee you would not get the same encounter had the chimp been raised in captivity around humans. I would use this to back up the point that animals do not automatically know how to communicate with humans.

“Because chimpanzees lack the vocal apparatus to make a variety of modulated sounds, the animals were taught a vocabulary of hand signs -- an approach first suggested in the 18th century by the French physician Julien Offray de La Mettrie.” (http://www.santafe.edu/~johnson/articles.chimp.html)
- Biologically a chimpanzee is not going to be able to form words like humans. They are able to make grunts but that’s as far as their speech gets. This supports my point that animals can not talk like humans.

""All primates express emotions, but because of her command of sign language, Koko can convey to us feelings that her wild counterparts cannot," explains Dr. Francine (Penny) Patterson, who heads the Gorilla Foundation and has been working with Koko and teaching her sign language since 1972.” (http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/koko/)
-Even though animals may not be able to verbally speak they still have forms of communication. Animals are capable of learning, but will this language they have learned be temporary. This supports the fact that animals can communicate, but they have to be conditioned

“In appearances on television talk shows, trainers claimed the chimps could construct sentences of several words. But upon closer examination, scientists found strong evidence that the chimps had simply learned to please their teachers by contorting their hands into all kinds of configurations. And the trainers, straining to find examples of linguistic communication, thought they saw words among the wiggling, like children seeing pictures in the clouds.” (http://www.santafe.edu/~johnson/articles.chimp.html)
- This explores the fact that animals may not actually know what they are signing. The Law of Effect means that if you do something and you get a good result you are more likely to do it again. This is the counterargument for the point I’m trying to make in my paper. This says that animals just do signing to please their trainers, and they do not really understand.