Understanding Language
One of the traits that characterizes our own species is language.
Some have contended strongly that language is in fact unique to
humans, and that no animal possesses language ability. While this
may certainly be true
at the sophisticated level of language possessed by humans, the question
remains whether some of the major defining characteristics of language
may nonetheless be acquired by animals. The many studies attempting
to teach language to apes have demonstrated that although these animals
seem incapable of or barely capable of producing language, they nevertheless
can learn to understand a language-like symbol system. For example,
Savage-Rumbaugh at Georgia State University has reported extensive
findings with a bonobo chimpanzee named Kanzi, showing Kanzi's ability
to understand many instructions given in spoken English. Similarly,
our work with a dolphin named Akeakamai has shown her ability to understand
instructions given within an artificial sign language, in which gestures
are like words and sequences of gestures are like sentences. The dolphin
demonstrated her understanding by carrying out the instructions correctly
in the large majority of cases, including instructions new to her
experience. To understand the instructions, the dolphin had to take
account of both the meaning of the words (gestures) and word order.
That is, she had to account for both the semantic and the syntactic
component of the language. The sentences comprising the instructions
may be from two to five words in length. For the two-word sentences
we state an object name and then we state an action name. The dolphin
understands to take the named action to the named object. For example,
the gestural instruction directs Akeakamai to jump over the dolphin
Phoenix. Other sentences request Akeakamai to construct a relation
between two objects, by taking one object to another or placing one
object on top of or inside another. Word order must be taken into
account. For example, the gestural sequence Surfboard Person Fetch
means, "take the person to the surfboard," whereas the sequence
Person Surfboard Fetch means the opposite, -"take the surfboard
to the person." The grammar used is inverse in its construction,
in the sense that the destination object is stated first, then the
object to be operated on, and finally the type of operation. This
inversion requires the dolphin to receive and process the entire sequence
before it can reliably interpret the instruction and organize its
response. Finally, there are also gestures for left and right, relative
to the dolphin as she faces her trainer. For example, the five-word
sequence, Right Basket Left Frisbee In means, "Put the Frisbee
on your left in the basket on your right." Most often, the dolphin
carries out her instructions correctly, occasionally operating on
the wrong object, but hardly ever mistaking the grammatical form of
the sentence. Our work, like the later work with the bonobo, has demonstrated
that dolphins and bonobos are capable of processing two of the fundamental
properties of language system-the semantic component, which deals
with meaning and the things that word refer to, and the syntactic
component, which is a system, such as word order, that governs how
one word is related to another word in a sentence grammatically.
Herman, L. M. (in press). Language learning.
In W. F. Perrin, B. Wursig, C. M. Thewissen, & C. R. Crumley
(Eds.). Encyclopedia of Marine Mammals. NY: Academic Press.
Herman, L. M. & Uyeyama,
R. K. (1999). The dolphin's grammatical competency: Comments on
Kako (1998). Animal Learning & Behavior, 27-18-23.
Herman, L .M., Kuczaj,
S. III, & Holder, M. D. (1993). Responses to Anomalous Gestural
Sequences by a Language-Trained Dolphin: Evidence for Processing
of Semantic Relations and Syntactic Information. Journal of Experimental
Psychology: General, 122, 184-194.
Herman, L. M., Morrel-Samuels, P. (1990). Knowledge acquisition
and asymmetries between language comprehension and production: Dolphins
and apes as a general model for animals. In M. Bekoff & D. Jamieson
(Eds.), Interpretation and explanation in the study of behavior:
Vol. 1: Interpretation, intentionality, and communication. (Pp.
283-312). Boulder: Westview Press.
Herman, L. M. (1986). Cognition
and language competencies of bottlenosed dolphins. In R. J. Schusterman,
J. Thomas, and F. G. Wood (Eds.) Dolphin cognition and behavior:
A comparative approach. (Pp. 221-251). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates.
Herman, L. M., Richards,
D. G. & Wolz, J. P. (1984). Comprehension of sentences by bottlenosed
dolphins. Cognition, 16, 129-219.
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