baboons ¹ ability seems language-like

[Ronald Kephart]

On 10/10/07 2:09 AM, "Kerim Friedman" <oxusnet at gmail.com> wrote:

> An interesting language-related tidbit from a NY Times article about
> experiments on Baboon social behavior:
> 
> http://tinyurl.com/2k9a4k
> 
> "In some of their playback experiments, Dr. Cheney and Dr. Seyfarth have
> tested baboons' knowledge of where everyone stands in the hierarchy. In a
> typical interaction, a dominant baboon gives a threat grunt, and its inferior
> screams. From their library of recorded baboon sounds, the researchers can
> fabricate a sequence in which an inferior baboon's threat grunt is followed by
> a superior's scream.
> 
> Baboons pay little attention when a normal interaction is played to them but
> show surprise when they hear the fabricated sequence implying their social
> world has been turned upside down.
> 
> This simple reaction says a lot about what is going in the baboon's mind. That
> the animal can construe "A dominates B," and distinguish it from "B dominates
> A," means it must be able to break a stream of sounds down into separate
> elements, recognize the meaning of each, and combine the meanings into a
> sentence-like thought.
> 
Huh? How does this follow from the evidence they give? I don't get it. What
I get from this is that the baboons recognize the voices of individuals,
know who is dominant and who is subordinate, and  are surprised to hear a
dominant call come from a subordinate, and vice versa.

> "That's what we do when we parse a sentence," Dr. Seyfarth said...
 
????

> Human language seems unique because no other species is capable of anything
> like speech. But when it comes to perceiving and deconstructing sounds, as
> opposed to making them, baboons' ability seems much more language-like."

I still think the baboon calls are holophrastic utterances; I don't see
evidence of dual patterning/discreteness. Am I missing something?

Ron
(With all due respect to baboons everywhere, whom I greatly admire. No
baboons were harmed in the writing of this message.)