baboons ¹ ability seems language- like

[Alexander King]

I'm glad I'm not the only one that couldn't find the sentences in the  
example. Isn't it pretty well established that many animals have call  
systems with clear social functions, such as warning others of  
danger, establishing hierarchies, mating preparation, etc.? I have  
interacted with a lot of domestic animals, from cats to cows, and  
they all pay little attention to each other or me when the goings ons  
are 'normal interaction'. When one does something abnormal, such as  
run around yelling and waving one's arms, animals I know usually act  
surprised--they ran away! My interaction with wild animals has been  
more limited, but the same pattern seems to hold.

Animals easily recognize each other through the sonic qualities of  
their calls -- the sounds of their voices. Seal moms and pups quickly  
learn to recognize one another by the sounds of their voices, and  
moms bark and listen for their pup's answer when coming back from  
hunting to find their pups on the beach--in the midst of 100s of  
seals (source: Animal Planet on BBC). These aren't sentences. Reading  
the NYT article is really annoying--claims that this pair is full of  
unique insight into animal behavior that any hunter or farmer already  
knows and comparisons of baboon society to 19th century Victorian  
women. The speculations on evolution strike me as typical stuff,  
hardly insightful.

Maybe Cheney and Seyfarth are doing cutting-edge work, but you can't  
tell from the way it was described in the NYT.

Alex


On 10 Oct 2007, at 19:50, Ronald Kephart wrote:

> 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.)
>

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