The Dolphin Institute - Dolphin Research Summaries

Responses of Atlantic bottle-nosed dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) and of humans were collected and analyzed in order to determine the features required for recognition and discrimination of systematically modified signs in which sign components were contrasted for competitive feature salience. One dolphin, with 6 years of training in the language, was shown these modified signs intermixed with normal signs in a linguistic, sentnence-comprehension context. A second dolphin, familiar with action signs only and with no sentence-comnprehension training, served as a nonlingual control. Human subjects were tested in two parallel tasks. The dolphin with sign-language experience attended to (in order of importance) location, completed temporal pattern, gross motor motion, and direction of motion, as salient features. Fine motor motion, hand shape, and hand orientation were less salient. The non-sign-language dolphin attended to all sign features equally and was unaffected by temporal pattern changes. Human tested in a linguistic context attended to (in order) gross motor motion, location, and an interaction of fine motor motion, hand shape, and hand orientation. Direction of motion and temporal pattern were not salient. Nonlinguistic-context humans attended to all sign features equally and were unaffectyed by temporal pattern changes. Results indicate that language experience and/or testing context affect feature salinece for sign recognition. Results also support the notion that there exists a higher order (general purpose) temporal pattern processor in dolphins in which visual as well as acoustic input is processed.

Shyan, M. R. and Herman, L. M. (1987). Determinants of recognition of gestural signs in an artificial language by Atlantic bottle-nosed dolphins (Tursiops turncatus) and humans (Homo sapiens). Journal of Comparitive Psychology, 101, 112-125.

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