A Bit More Detail

I’m not sure about the exact import of Ed Yong’s post at Not Exactly Rocket Science. The ability of other primates–primates which do not make use of language, at least not human-style spoken language–to determine the deep patterns of phonemes and syllables in specific languages does imply both rather impressive levels of intelligence among baboons in at least the domain of pattern recognition and another instance of humans’ over-estimating their capabilities relative their peers.

‘Wasp’ is an English word, but ‘telk’ is not. You and I know this because we speak English. But in a French laboratory, six baboons have also learned to tell the difference between genuine English words, and nonsense ones. They can sort their wasps from their telks, even though they have no idea that the former means a stinging insect and the latter means nothing. They don’t understand the language, but can ‘read’ nonetheless.

At its most basic level, reading is about recognising patterns. We look at letters (or other symbols) and identify them based on their number, position and angles of lines. This is a trivial task, and one that doesn’t require any language. Letters are no different to any other object in our environment that we can recognise. A pigeon can be trained to do discriminate between letters.

The next step is harder. We unite letters into words by looking at their positions relative to one another. This is called “orthographic processing”. It’s the stage where, according to general consensus, language kicks in. As we see clusters of letters, we think about the sounds they represent and we read the word aloud in our heads. But Jonathan Grainger from Aix-Marseille University has shown that orthographic processing can happen without any knowledge of language, or how words are meant to sound.

Grainger trained baboons to recognise English words, and tell them apart from very similar nonsense words. The monkeys learned quickly, and could even categorise words they had never seen before. They weren’t anglophiles by any stretch. Instead, their abilities suggest that the act of reading words is just a more advanced version of the pattern-recognition skill that lets us identify letters. It’s a skill that was there long before the first human had scrawled the first letter.

[. . .]

None of the six baboons had seen words or letters before. But over a month and a half, and thousands of trials, all of them learned to distinguish words from non-words with around 75 per cent accuracy (50 per cent would be pure guesswork). The most successful of them – Dan – built up a vocabulary of 308 words.

Their achievement is remarkable, not least because the non-words were very similar to the actual ones. Rather than obvious fakes like ‘qzxc’, they all contained pairs of letters that occur in real words, although they veered towards rarer combinations. And the monkeys weren’t just memorising the words. They were still more likely to pick a set of letters they had never seen before, if it was an actual English word.

Grainger thinks that the baboons learned to tell the real words from the fakes by using the frequencies of letter combinations within them. They learned which combinations were most likely to be found in real words, and made their choices accordingly. They had gleaned the stats of English, without any knowledge of the language itself.

Stanislas Deheane, one of the leading figures in the science of reading, thinks that the study is “extraordinarily exciting”. He says, “It fits very nicely with my own research, which suggests that reading relies, in part, on learning the purely visual statistics of letters and their combinations.”

Over at the Discover-hosted blog Not Exactly Rocket Science, Ed Yong posts about the efforts of Denise Herzing, a Florida-based dolphin researcher who has been studying dolphins in the wild, to come up with new protocols for enabling two-way communications between dolphins and human beings.

Wild dolphin communication is hard to study. They are fast-moving and hard to follow. They travel in groups, making it hard to assign any call to a specific individual. And they communicate at frequencies beyond what humans can hear. Despite these challenges, there is some evidence that dolphins use sounds to represent concepts. Each individual has its own “signature whistle” which might act like a name. Developed in the first year of life, dolphins use these whistles as badges of identity, and may modulate them to reflect motivation and mood. This year, a study showed that when wild dolphins meet, one member of each group exchanges signature whistles.

[. . . Herzing] notes that captive animals, which often lack stimulation, will respond to systems like the underwater keyboards. She thinks that these experiments disappointed because they were cumbersome. “The dolphins swim very fast and went to where they were requested, but humans are very slow in the water. There wasn’t enough real-time interaction.”

Herzing is trying to solve that problem with Cetacean Hearing and Telemetry (CHAT) – a lighter, portable version of the underwater keyboards. It consists of a small phone-sized computer, strapped to a diver’s chest and connected to two underwater recorders, or hydrophones. The computer will detect and differentiate dolphin sounds, including the ultrasonic ones we cannot hear, and use flashing lights to tell the diver which animal made the call.

The CHAT device can also play artificial calls, allowing Herzing to coin dolphin-esque “words” for things that are relevant to them, like “seaweed” or “wave-surfing”. She hopes the dolphins will mimic the artificial whistles, and use them voluntarily. By working with wild animals, and focusing on objects in their natural environment, rather than balls or hoops, Herzing hopes to pique their interest.

Herzing emphasises that her device is not a translator. It will not act as a dolphin-human Rosetta stone. Instead, she wants both species create a joint form of communication that they are both invested in. She hopes that CHAT will tap into the “natural propensity” that dolphins have “for creating common information when they have to interact”. For example, in Costa Rica, distantly related bottlenose and Guyana dolphins will adopt a shared collection of sounds when they come together, using sounds that they don’t use when apart.

As with past projects, all of this depends on whether the dolphins play along. Kuczaj says, “It’s a remarkable challenge because she is working with wild dolphins so they’ve got the option to participate or not.” Here, Herzing has an edge, since the animals know her, and vice versa. “We’ve been observing them underwater every summer since 1985,” she says. “I know the individuals personally – their personalities and relationships. We’ve got a pretty good handle on what they’d be interested in.” Perhaps this combination of cutting-edge technology and old-school fieldwork will finally produce the conversations that have eluded scientists for so long.

James Nicoll linked the other day to the news, reported by Australian Geographic‘s Hannah Price, that in Australia, human communications systems are influencing the native parrot species.

(Cross-species cultural diffusion is such a cool idea.)

The Australian Museum’s Search and Discover desk, which offers a free service to identify species, has received numerous reports of encounters with talkative birds in the wild from mystified citizens who thought they were hearing voices.

Martyn Robinson, a naturalist who works at the desk, explains that occasionally a pet cockatoo escapes or is let loose, and “if it manages to survive long enough to join a wild flock, [other birds] will learn from it.”

As well as learning from humans directly, “the birds will mimic each other,” says Jaynia Sladek, from the Museum’s ornithology department. “There’s no reason why, if one comes into the flock with words, [then] another member of the flock wouldn’t pick it up as well.”

‘Hello cockie’ is the most common phrase, though there have been a few cases of foul-mouthed feathered friends using expletives which we can’t repeat here.

The evolution of language could well be passed on through the generations, says Martyn. “If the parents are talkers and they produce chicks, their chicks are likely to pick up some of that,” he says. This phenomenon is not unique; some lyrebirds in southern Australia still reproduce the sounds of axes and old shutter-box cameras their ancestors once learnt.

In rural areas talking parrots will probably begin to lose their language abilities, says Martyn, with some words “likely to just disintegrate a bit and become part of that particular flock’s repertoire.”

However, in Australia’s big cities like Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, cockatoos will probably maintain and improve their vocabulary due to regular contact with humans. “That’s certainly the case in the Botanic Gardens [in Sydney],” says Martyn. “If you say ‘hello’ or ‘hello cockie’ to the cockatoos, and if they’re interested in you and not just picking around for food, you may well trigger a response.”

• 80 Beats reports that NASA’s Mercury probe Messenger has determined that the innermost planet in our solar system is almost entirely solid iron, with a much thinner mantle and crust than had been believed before.
• Centauri Dreams describes how self-replicating probes might set up–might already have set up?–an interstellar communications network, slowly spreading out from a point.
• Daniel Drezner makes the point that books claiming to trace the origins of economic prosperity in certain policies can’t be overly reductive–how did North Korea keep up economically with South Korea until the mid-1970s, for instance?
• Extraordinary Observation’s Rob Pitingolo is unimpressed by playwright/performer Mike Daisey’s claims that, notwithstanding actual errors of facts and near-certain lies on his part in his piece on workers issues at an Apple manufacturer’s plant in China, he speaks to a deeper truth.
• Geocurrents reports on conflicted responses to immigrant childrearing practices in Norway and Argentina’s Tierra del Fuego electronics manufacturing industry.
• Language Hat reports that defenders of Chomsky’s theory of language are responding to anthropologist Dan Everett’s apparent disproof of Chomsky’s thesis with the language of the Piraha by getting him banned and calling him a racist. Not cool.
• Steve Munro links to and summarizes a recent city report making the case for light rail in Scarborough, as opposed to subway extension.
• Torontoist points out that Rob Ford’s call for a referendum on subway construction was legally ill-founded and near-pointless.
• Towleroad links to a neat video on life on the isolated South Atlantic island of Tristan da Cunha.

The blog As A Linguist makes the point that systems of communication are not automatically languages. Cats communicate–Shakespeare communicates with me on any number of things–but their communications are simple. (So far as we know.)

The fact is, many people think that animals can use and understand language when they really just mean to say that animals can communicate. All animals and even plants have their own way of communicating, but is that the same thing as human language? It is a matter of controversy, actually. Some claim that systems of communication amongst prairie dogs, dolphins, and chimpanzees have the same characteristics and level of complexity as human language does. Others, however, may concede the relative sophistication of certain communication systems, but argue that they still do not perform all the functions of a full human language.

[. . .]

What about productivity? Animals certainly seem to be limited to certain chunks of informative utterances that aren’t generally productive. A cat may have something completely different in her mind, like “I’d really like a belly rub now”, but there are only so many variations on the meow theme that they have at their disposal, so we humans are left to guess what it might mean. Of course, body language can come in handy, but again – a fluffy tail will always mean “Holy crap!” and will never be used in novel ways to express something completely different.

Moreover, animal communication nearly always refers to the present time, which means there seems to be little or no capability for displacement. Sure, bees have been known to be able to communicate the way to a good pollen source, which is technically speaking, the past tense. But it’s the immediate past tense and never more than that. They can’t dance to communicate something like, “Dude, do you remember that great pollen we found last month? Yeah, that was great. They don’t make flowers like that anymore.”

Mrs. Parker will never be able to explain why she so loves the sleeve of a fleece robe.
And finally, while some animals may have very sophisticated systems that can inform, express intention, and even convey emotion, they are still limited in what they can “say.” Meta-cognition, or meta-linguistics refers to our ability to think about thinking, or talk about talking. We are aware of the behavior itself and can discuss it. We don’t just have feelings; we lie on couches and pay good money to talk about those feelings, to analyze and process and understand those feelings. Who knows, maybe animals can do this too, but aren’t foolish enough to pay anyone to listen to them, but at this time, we don’t know if they can because they can’t tell us, at least not in a way we can understand.

Research findings like those described in Elizabeth Norton’s article at Science Now on cetacean language make the argument in favour of granting legal personhood to certain species of cetaceans all the more compelling. Names matter.

Bottlenose dolphins have a knack for language. They can understand both the meaning and the order of words conveyed through human hand gestures—correctly putting an item on the right side of their tank into a basket on the left, for example. Now humans, too, are beginning to understand dolphin language as more than just a cacophony of clicks, pulses, and whistles. A new study shows that dolphins use their own unique calls, known as signature whistles, to introduce themselves to others when meeting at sea.

[. . .]

Marine biologists Vincent Janik and Nicola Quick of the Sea Mammal Research Unit at the University of St. Andrews in the United Kingdom were focusing on signature whistles as a way of understanding how dolphins communicate in the natural world. “Dolphins are comparable to great apes in their cognitive skills, but all we know is what they do in a lab,” Janik explains. “We wanted to understand how dolphins use their intelligence outside of the tasks that humans set for them.”

To learn more, Quick and Janik followed a group of bottlenose dolphins that swim long distances around the eastern coast of Scotland. The researchers used a small boat to tow an array of underwater microphones, called hydrophones, about 2 meters below the surface and recorded the sounds of individual dolphins identified by their dorsal fins. The animals were matched with their calls by their surfacing locations and swim speed, as well as by digital cameras while they were near the surface.

The dolphins used signature whistles when meeting up with another group, Quick and Janik report online today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. What’s more, they gave the distinctive whistle only if they actually mingled with the other dolphins. Of 11 “conversations,” only two did not result in the groups’ joining together, and only once did the groups join up without first exchanging whistles.

Even more intriguing was that only one member of each group gave the signature whistle. According to Janik, there could be several explanations. The group could have a leader doing the “talking;” the dolphins may have identified each other using echolocation (the clicks the dolphins send out that echo back from nearby objects), and the whistle was more of a ritual; or the groups may have been together previously and already known each other.

Human language may well have originated in the African continent with the human species. One recent study even claimed that it was possible to determine the part of Africa where language evolved. A recent (summarized) study in Science suggests that this recent study made overblown claims.

In the beginning was the word – yes, but where exactly? Last year, Quentin Atkinson, a cultural anthropologist at Auckland University in New Zealand, proposed that the cradle of language could be localized in the southwest of Africa. The report, which appeared in Science, one of the world’s leading scholarly journals, was seized upon by the media and caused something of a sensation. Now however, linguist Michael Cysouw from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich has published a commentary in Science which argues that this neat “Out-of-Africa” hypothesis for the origin of language is not adequately supported by the data presented. The search for the site of origin of language remains very much alive.

Atkinson based his claim on a comparative analysis of the numbers of phonemes found in about 500 present-day languages. Phonemes are the most basic sound units – consonants, vowels and tones – that form the basis of semantic differentiation in all languages. The number of phonemes used in natural languages varies widely. Atkinson, who is a biologist and psychologist by training, found that the highest levels of phoneme diversity occurred in languages spoken in southwestern Africa. Furthermore, according to his statistical analysis, the size of the phoneme inventory in a language tends to decrease with distance from this hotspot. To interpret this finding Atkinson invoked a parallel from population genetics. Biologists have observed an analogous effect, insofar as human genetic diversity is found to decrease with distance from Africa, where our species originated. This is attributed to the so-called founder effect. As people migrated from the continent and small groups continued to disperse, each inevitably came to represent an ever-shrinking fraction of the total genetic diversity present in the African population as a whole.

So does such a founder effect play a similarly significant effect in the dispersal and differentiation of languages? Michael Cysouw regards Atkinson’s finding as “artefactual”. Cysouw, whose work is funded by one of the prestigious Starting Grants awarded by the European Research Council (ERC), heads a research group that studies quantitative comparative linguistics in LMU’s Faculty of Languages and Literatures. He says he has no objection in principle to the use of methods borrowed from other disciplines to tackle questions in linguistics, but that problems arise from their inappropriate application. For example, he finds that if Atkinson’s method is employed to examine other aspects of language, such as the construction of subordinate clauses or the use of the passive mood, the results “do not point in the same direction”.

Indeed, in their article in Science, Cysouw and his coauthors Steven Moran (LMU) and Dan Dediu of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen show that, depending on the features considered, Atkinson’s method places the site of origin of language in eastern Africa or the Caucasus or somewhere else entirely. As Cysouw points out, linguists have long sought to throw light on the origin of language by analyzing patterns of language distribution. The problem is that such relationships can be reliably traced only as far back as about 10,000 years before the present.

It’s notoriously difficult to come up with hard data on languages in deep historical time, with the various efforts to construct ur-languages predating the earliest recorded languages (i.e. Sumerian, Akkadian, Chinese) or plausible reconstructions (i.e. Indo-European) tending to be mutually contradictory. The data is too sparse and the time too deep, at least for the methods we’ve developed so far.

All that said, I wonder if the different results reported in the summary of Cysouw’s paper–language originated in southwest Africa as defined by this trait, in east Africa according to that, in the Caucasus as shown by a third–might actually constitute a point against the monogenesis of language, against the idea that language evolved in a single region or even a single community before being picked up by the remainder of the human species. If different widely separated populations developed language independently and then came into contact with each other, the resulting contact languages might retain each source language’s distinctive traits. (Might. I speculate at the limit of my knowledge.)

Thoughts?