Why Are No Animal Communication Systems Simple Languages? [PDF]
Frontiers in Psychology, 2021 Individuals of some animal species have been taught simple versions of human language despite their natural communication systems failing to rise to the level of a simple language.
Michael D. Beecher, Michael D. Beecher
doaj +3 more sources
Not your private tête-à-tête: leveraging the power of higher-order networks to study animal communication. [PDF]
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci, 2023 Animal communication is frequently studied with conventional network representations that link pairs of individuals who interact, for example, through vocalization.
Iacopini I +4 more
europepmc +3 more sources
Overcoming bias in the comparison of human language and animal communication. [PDF]
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A, 2023 Human language is a powerful communicative and cognitive tool. Scholars have long sought to characterize its uniqueness, but each time a property is proposed to set human language apart (e.g., reference, syntax), some (attenuated) version of that ...
Cartmill EA.
europepmc +2 more sources
Optionality in animal communication: a novel framework for examining the evolution of arbitrariness. [PDF]
Biol Rev Camb Philos Soc, 2022 A critical feature of language is that the form of words need not bear any perceptual similarity to their function – these relationships can be ‘arbitrary’.
Watson SK +7 more
europepmc +2 more sources
Syntax and compositionality in animal communication. [PDF]
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci, 2020 Syntax has been found in animal communication but only humans appear to have generative, hierarchically structured syntax. How did syntax evolve? I discuss three theories of evolutionary transition from animal to human syntax: computational capacity ...
Zuberbühler K.
europepmc +2 more sources
What can animal communication teach us about human language? [PDF]
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci, 2020 Language has been considered by many to be uniquely human. Numerous theories for how it evolved have been proposed but rarely tested. The articles in this theme issue consider the extent to which aspects of language, such as vocal learning, phonology ...
Fishbein AR +3 more
europepmc +2 more sources
Brevity is not a universal in animal communication: evidence for compression depends on the unit of analysis in small ape vocalizations. [PDF]
R Soc Open Sci, 2020 Evidence for compression, or minimization of code length, has been found across biological systems from genomes to human language and music. Two linguistic laws—Menzerath's Law (which states that longer sequences consist of shorter constituents) and Zipf'
Clink DJ, Ahmad AH, Klinck H.
europepmc +2 more sources
Taking turns: bridging the gap between human and animal communication. [PDF]
Proc Biol Sci, 2018 Language, humans’ most distinctive trait, still remains a ‘mystery’ for evolutionary theory. It is underpinned by a universal infrastructure—cooperative turn-taking—which has been suggested as an ancient mechanism bridging the existing gap between the ...
Pika S +3 more
europepmc +2 more sources
Plant–animal communication [PDF]
Ann Bot, 2012 There are numerous excellent books about plant–pollinator and plant–herbivore interactions, and books about plant defence, but none of these covers the process of communication between plants and animals as comprehensively as this volume. The authors define communication as occuring ‘if traits of the sender stimulate the sensory systems of the receiver
europepmc +3 more sources
Testing a key assumption in animal communication: between-individual variation in female visual systems alters perception of male signals. [PDF]
Biol Open, 2017 Variation in male signal production has been extensively studied because of its relevance to animal communication and sexual selection. Although we now know much about the mechanisms that can lead to variation between males in the properties of their ...
Ronald KL +4 more
europepmc +2 more sources