On animal communication

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On animal communication

• Some cognitive abilities of animals

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(No Transcript)
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1. Introduction

• Studies of trained animals in a laboratory
  environment
• Non-human primates
• Washoe and other chimpanzees (Gardner Gardner
  1969 1978)
• Sarah and three other African-born chimpanzees
  (e.g., Premack 1976)
• Kanzi, the bonobo (e.g., Savage-Rumbaugh Lewin
  1994)
• Koko, the lowland gorilla (Patterson 1978a
  1978b)
• Chantek, the orangutan (Miles 1978 1983)
• Nim, the chimpanzee (e.g. Terrace 1983)
• Non-primates
• Squirrel monkeys (Burdyn Thomas 1984)
• Bottle-nosed dolphins (e.g., Herman 1987 1989)
• Californian sea lions (Schusterman Krieger
  1984 Schusterman Gisiner 1988)
• Alex, the African Grey parrot (e.g., Pepperberg
  1999b)

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• Communication systems
• Chimpanzee Washoe
• American Sign Language (ASL)
• Raising in an environment appropriate for a human
  child
• living quarters with furniture, a kitchen,
  bedroom, bathroom, toys, tools, etc.
• days made up of meals, naps, baths, play,
  schooling, and outings
• Chimpanzee Sarah
• Object-word relationship
• pieces of plastic, backed with metal adhering to
  a magnetized slate, each standing for some
  English word
• Bonobo Kanzi
• Yerkish, an artificial lexigram system
• portable, folding posterboard containing printed
  lexigram symbols

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• Orangutan Chantek
• Pidgin Sign English
• based on gestural signs of ASL
• English word order
• little grammatical morphology
• Chimpanzee Nim
• Pidgin sign language
• Californian sea lions Rocky Bucky
• Artificial gestural language
• Bottle-nosed dolphins Phoenix Ake
• Artificial languages
• acoustic language and "dolphinized" version of a
  gestural language

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• Studies of animals in their natural behavior and
  environment
• Vervet monkey species
• Cheney and Seyfarth (1992)
• Continuous period of 11 years
• Kenya's Amboseli National Park
• Zuberbühler (2002), Zuberbühler, Cheney
  Seyfarth (1999)
• Rainforest of the Ivory Coast

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2. Animals linguistic abilities

• Question
• Which traits in animal behavior may relate to
  language-related cognitive abilities?

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2.1 Communicative intentions

• Claim
• Non-human animal communication is restricted to
  imperatives.
• But what is the communicative intention e.g. of
  the leopard, the eagle, and snake alarm calls of
  vervet monkeys?

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• Levels of intentionality
• Zero-order
• No beliefs or desires at all
• First-order
• Beliefs and desires
• No beliefs about beliefs
• Second-, third-, or higher-order
• Some conception about one's own and other
  individuals states of mind

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• The communicative system of vervet monkeys
  (Cheney Seyfarth 1990 1992)
• Four phonologically distinct and arbitrary
  calls? representational signals standing for an
  (even invisible) object
• Wrr ? given when neighboring group has first been
  spotted
• Snake call
• reaction stand bipedally and peer into
  surrounding grass
• Leopard call
• reaction vervets on the ground run into trees
• Eagle call
• reaction look up or run into bushes

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• Observations
• Vervet monkeys calls are
• suggestive of first-order intentionality
• reason calling monkeys want others to run into
  trees, bushes, etc.
• not necessarily suggestive of second-order
  intentionality
• in that case they would want others to think that
  there is a leopard, eagle, or python nearby

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• Most important motivation of animal
  communication is manipulative rather than
  declarative!
• Terrace (1985) calls this motivation acquisitive
• Communicative behavior of animals gears primarily
  at expressing requests
• 96 of the lexigram utterances made by bonobo
  Kanzi
• 86 of all utterances (65 for objects and 18
  for actions) in Rivas (2005) sample on five
  chimpanzees
• Chimpanzee signing mostly acquisitive in nature
• Note Motivations of apes cannot be reduced to
  being manipulative!
• found signing when alone, e.g. looking at
  pictures in magazines
• imaginative play using signing, or talk to
  themselves
• signings purpose unlikely to have been
  request-oriented!

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• But Animal communication is not exclusively
  acquisitive!
• Bonobo Kanzi
• 4 of his utterances indicatives or statements
• Chimpanzees
• 4 of their utterances answers on questions by
  humans
• 2 to name or label objects and pictures
• 8 communicative intention not evident
• largest categories of speech acts action
  requests and naming
• almost ¼ of chimpanzees communications other
  kinds of sign acts
• Gorilla Koko
• comments about state of the environment via
  signing
• E.g., signing of LISTEN QUIET when alarm clock
  stopped ringing next door

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2.2 Concepts

• Conceptual abilities of non-human animals
• Wildborn squirrel monkeys
• Claim Squirrel monkeys have "natural concepts"
  and are capable of using working memory with
  conceptual information
• remembrance of conceptual information for at
  least 16 seconds in order to make a conceptual
  choice
• Laboratory pigeons (Herrnstein, Loveland Cable
  1976)
• Reliable and discriminate responses to exemplars
  of water (pictures of puddles, streams, lakes,
  etc.), trees, people, leaves, and fish
• ? even when new pictures were presented
• Wild Diana monkeys (Zuberbühler, Cheney
  Seyfarth 1999)
• Referential abilities Females react with their
  eagle alarm call not only on eagle shrieks but
  also on males eagle alarm calls

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• Obligatory abilities in order to understand a
  concept
• Understanding that different referents are
  instantiations of one and the same entity.
• Understanding that such instantiations include
  referents that are outside the here and now of a
  given situation.
• Use of learned entity in new contexts.
• Reconstruction of the presence of a conceptual
  entity.
• Production of novel instances of instances of
  that entity.
• Relating of different conceptual entities to one
  another on the basis of size, shape, color, etc.

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• Extension
• Animals are able to over-generalize, that is,
  to extend the use of a form-meaning pairing to
  referents beyond the ones canonically associated
  with that unit.
• ? conceptual reasoning

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• Orangutan Chantek
• Use of the sign LYN not only for his caregiver
  Lyn Miles but for all caregivers
• Use of the sign DIRTY to refer to bad things,
  until BAD was learned
• Lowland gorilla Koko
• Extension of the sign STRAW, learned initially
  with reference to drinking straws, to plastic
  tubing, cigarettes, and a car radio antenna
• Extension of the sign NUT, learned initially as a
  name for packaged nuts, to roasted soybeans,
  sunflower seeds, and pictures of nuts
• Bottle-nosed dolphins
• Generalization of the signal HOOP, taught
  initially as a name for a particular, large,
  octagonal floating plastic hoop, to hoops of
  different sizes, shapes, etc., as well as to
  sinking instead of floating hoops
• Extension of the sign WATER, taught initially to
  refer to a thin stream flowing from an ordinary
  garden hose, to a waterfall when WATER was used
  in a sentence for the first time at that new
  location

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• Same vs. Different
• There is conceptual knowledge at least in some
  animals!
• Squirrel monkeys
• Association of triangularity with choosing same
  and heptagonality with choosing different
• Dolphins and sea lions
• Response to novel combinations of attribute
  object labels as well as to novel combinations of
  actions object labels (Pepperberg 1992)

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• Pepperbergs Grey parrot Alex
• Comparison of objects with one another on the
  basis of relational concepts of 'same' and
  'different'
• Discrimination between objects on the basis of
  color, shape, and material
• E.g., when asked What color is (item designated
  by shape-X and material-Y)? ? distinctions on
  known as well as on novel objects
• Distinction between relative differences in
  objects size
• Transfer of size relationships to objects not
  involved in training
• Transfer of his knowledge to items of novel
  colors, shapes, and sizes
• Indication of situation of items not differing in
  size

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2.3 Lexicon

• Which types of form-meaning pairings can animals
  distinguish?
• E.g., artificial languages used to train
  bottle-nosed dolphins objects, actions, and
  properties
• Contra human-chimpanzee interaction (Rivas 2005
  Gardner Gardner 1978)
• Acquisition of a large range of ASL unit types
• Presentations of only the following classes of
  signs objects, actions, request markers (GIMME,
  HURRY), deictic sign THAT/THERE/YOU, chimpanzee's
  own name sign

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• Numbers
• Can animals represent numerosity?
• Can they identify a property of the stimulus that
  is defined by the number of distinguishable
  elements it contains?
• Can they count?
• Can they use numerical representations
  recursively?

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• a) Can animals identify a property of the
  stimulus that is defined by the number of
  distinguishable elements it contains?
• Discrimination of stimuli differing in number
• See Brannon Terrace (1998) e.g., pigeons,
  parrots, rats, dolphins, monkeys, and chimpanzees
• See Koehler (1943 1950), Pepperberg (1987a),
  Boysen Berntson (1989)
• Ravens and jackdaws succeeded on numerical
  match-to-sample tests on quantities up to 8
• Chimpanzee Sheba demonstration of ordinality and
  labelling of the sum of two arrays separated in
  time and space
• Grey parrot Alex correct reply to question How
  many?, production of vocal numerical labels for
  sets of 2 to 6 objects, abilities in handling
  numerical quantities
• E.g., when presented two pieces of cork or five
  pieces of wood ? responses two cork and five wood

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• b) Can animals count?
• c) Can animals use numerical representations
  recursively?
• Neither do non-human animals show a concept of
  counting, nor do they appear to have the capacity
  to create open-ended generative systems.
• No natural ability to discriminate numerosity
• Utilization as a "last resort", if other bases
  for discrimination, such as shape, color, size,
  frequency, or duration of a stimulus, are
  eliminated
• Rhesus monkeys (Brannon Terrace 1998)
• Spontaneous representation of the numbers of
  novel visual stimuli
• Extrapolation of an ordinal rule to novel
  numerosities
• Grey parrot Alex skills in handling numbers
• No capability of counting or of a recursive
  understanding of numbers

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2.4 Functional items

• Location
• Chimpanzees
• Learned red and dish, then understood command
  'Insert the apple (in) red dish'
• Gorilla Koko
• Signs for prepositions on, out, and up
• Grey parrots
• Concepts of in versus on
• to get an item that is in another object, one
  type of manipulation must be used
• to get an item that is on another object,
  manipulation is different
• Bottle-nosed dolphin Phoenix
• Ability to link an action term ('fetch) with a
  transport object, a destination object, and
  spatial terms, being asked to carry a frisbee
  through, over, or under a hoop

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• Deixis
• Washoe
• Distinction of personal deixis
• sign for 'me' by tapping one's own chest
• sign for 'you' by pointing away from the chest
  toward the addressee
• "wild card sign" frequently used pointing sign
  THAT/THERE/YOU
• Gorilla Koko
• Signs for 'me' and 'you'
• Orangutan Chantek
• Distinction of 'I' and 'you'
• Chimpanzee Sarah
• Spatial deixis
• comprehension of difference between Sarah take
  this and Sarah take that
• production of Give Sarah this vs. Give Sarah
  that
• production of demonstratives pronominally and
  attributively ? Give Sarah this cookie vs.
  Give Sarah that cookie

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• Negation
• Do animals have, or can they be trained to
  distinguish negative concepts such as
• (a) rejection,
• (b) non-existence, and
• (c) denial?

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• (a) Rejection
• ? Most animal species that have been
  appropriately trained know to handle the notion
  of rejection.(Pepperberg 1999b)

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• (b) Non-existence
• Washoe and others
• Comments upon the absence of a familiar object at
  a customary location
• Other chimpanzees
• Correct responses to questions about objects not
  present for sensory reference
• Grey parrot Alex
• Reaction to an objects absence nuh to refuse an
  object offered instead of the requested
• Limited use of the concept of non-occurrence or
  absence

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• (c) Denial
• Difficulties in understanding this concept
• Chimpanzee Sarah
• E.g., "Red on green ?" ( 'Is red on green?')
• referring to the relationship of two colored
  cards
• Alteration of relationship on 30 of the
  occasions to make it possible for her to answer
  'Yes' rather than 'No'

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• Questions
• Chimpanzees
• Concept of polar (yes-no) and WH-questions
• Gorilla Koko
• Creation of a sign for polar questions by use of
  gestural intonation
• Grey parrot Alex
• Comprehension of vocal questions
• Extraction of relevant categories from word
  questions
• Ability to produce questions by use of what
• Bottle-nosed dolphin Ake
• Polar interrogative form sign for an object
  question sign
• Productive response to signal presence vs.
  absence of an object

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2.5 Compositionality

• Combination of form-meaning pairings in trained
  non-human primates
• ? Chimpanzee Washoe after 10 months of training
• ? Chimpanzee Moja at the age of 6 months
• ? Gorilla Koko after 4 months of sign language
  training
• Questions
• Can animals combine form-meaning pairings with
  each pairing retaining its meaning constant?
• Do they understand that utterances can be broken
  up into concepts and can be combined productively
  and in a principled way?
• Are they able to use at least two paradigms of
  linguistic forms productively in a sequence?

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• Alex
• Recombination of beginnings and ends of existent
  labels
• E.g., utterances such as "banacker"
  (banana-cracker)
• Kanzi, the bonobo
• Perception of Tickle ball as consisting of two
  distinct units rather than of one unanalyzed
  entity
• suggested by his ability to re-combine these
  units
• Bottle-nosed dolphins
• Interpretation of PIPE TAIL-TOUCH as a command to
  perform an action on an object
• that is, interpretation as an expression
  consisting of two discrete entities
• Wild Diana monkeys
• Combinatory rule suggestive of a concatenation of
  form-meaning pairings and of a grammatical
  function
• Sequences of two calls are not productive since
  there are no other form-meaning pairings to which
  they could be applied.

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2.6 Argument structure

• Are animals able to form sentences that can be
  said to be homologs or analogs of what we find in
  human language?
• Do they have the ability to acquire an argument
  structure?

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• Chimpanzee Sarah
• Distinction between case functions ("subject" vs.
  "object")
• Comprehension of name of when used as part of
  an ACC phrase
• Note previously, name of always being confined
  to NOM phrase
• Transfer of quantifiers from NOM phrase to ACC
  phrase
• E.g., production of sentences such as 'Some
  cracker is round,' 'All cracker is PL square,'
  etc., followed by correct performance when
  instructed 'Sarah take some cracker,' etc.
• Grey parrot Alex
• Use of structures wanna go location unit and
  want/wanna object unit with a range of
  form-meaning categories
• Distinction of
• volitional propositions (want X, wanna go X) and
• commands (e.g., go X, you tickle me)

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2.7 Linear arrangement

• Are animals capable to develop a way of
  consistently and productively ordering paradigms
  of form-meaning pairings?
• In other words, do animals have something
  corresponding to word order in human language?

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• Regular patternings
• Chimpanzees Ally and Koko
• preference for order DEM N" in 92 of
  two-sign constructions
• preference for order SUBJ V OBJ" in 89 of
  three-sign constructions
• preference for order ADJ N in 75 of
  attributive phrases in two-sign utterances
• Linear arrangement in bottle-nosed dolphins
• Inference of thematic object roles (transport vs.
  designation) from syntactic position
• Ability to distinguish between PIPE FETCH HOOP
  'Fetch the pipe to the hoop' and HOOP FETCH PIPE
  'Fetch the hoop to the pipe
• Iconic ordering patterns
• E.g., orders like tickle-bite and chase-hide
• Ordering distinctions
• Orangutan Chantek
• object-GIVE when object referred to was present
• GIVE-object when object referred to was absent

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2.8 Coordination

• NO subordination, BUT patterns of coordinating
  concatenation!
• Chimpanzee Sarah
• Acquisition of ability to conjoin nouns
• Combination of two to three nouns having the same
  syntactic function in the same sentence objects
  of one and the same verb
• E.g., "Mary give Sarah apple banana orange."
• Bottle-nosed dolphin Phoenix
• Instruction to act on a sequence of two
  propositions each consisting of an object and an
  action, e.g.,
• Instruction PIPE TAIL-TOUCH PIPE OVER
• Response swimming to the pipe, touching it with
  her tail flukes, and jumping over it

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2.9 Taxonomic concepts

• Do animals have, or can they acquire relational
  categories, in the sense that they perceive
  and/or describe one concept in terms of another
  concept?
• Tomasello Call (1997)
• Primates ? strong evidence in favor of taxonomic
  concepts
• A number of animals, including avian species, are
  able to both perceive and produce predications on
  the basis of sameness and differences between
  objects
• Premack (1976)
• Chimpanzees distinguish between first and second
  order relations
• Observation e.g. that the relation between red
  and red is same, as that between grey and
  grey is same, and that the relation between
  red and red is the same as that between
  grey and grey
• the latter being a relation between relations (?
  second order relation)

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• (1) Hierarchical taxonomic relations
• Inclusion A is a kind/type of B (e.g., An apple
  tree is a kind/type of tree).
• Property relationship B has property A(a red
  ball)
• Partonomy (or meronymy) A is a part of B(A
  finger is part of a hand)
• Social relationship A is a relative of B(Annes
  father, husband, etc.)
• Possession A has B(Annes car, name, etc.)
• Location B is located at A(the book on the
  table)

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• (1a) Inclusion
• Common domain modifying compounding
• no clear instances of it in non-human animals,
  nor of productive compounding in general
• Interpretation of reported combinations of
  form-meaningful pairings
• unitary, non-compositional meanings
• combinations of free forms
• Chimpanzee Washoe
• described a swan by signing WATER BIRD
• Savage-Rumbaugh et al. (1980)
• Chimpanzees interpret symbols (lexigrams for
  specific foods or tools) in order to then label
  them with lexigrams for the hypernyms food or
  tool
• Chimpanzees have ability to treat food and
  tool as representational labels, and to expand
  the use of these labels to novel exemplars
• Reason training encouraging the appearance of
  functional symbolic communication between
  chimpanzees

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• (1b) Property relationship
• Gorilla Koko
• Acquisition of distinct signs for 16 modifiers,
  including 'big', 'clean', 'cold', etc.
• Trained African Grey parrots
• Classification of objects on the basis of
  physical properties
• color (blue, green, grey, etc.), shape (2-corner,
  3-corner, 4-corner, etc.), and material (chain,
  hide, key, etc.)
• Extension of the word rock as a label to the
  property 'hard'
• Chimpanzee Sarah
• Sentences of the target form "Sarah take red
  dish"
• Question markers as in Red ? apple and Yellow
  ? banana
• Orangutan Chantek
• Use of attributes, as in red bird and white
  cheese food eat
• Sea lions bottle-nosed dolphins
• Modifiers for color (BLACK, WHITE, GREY), size
  (LARGE, SMALL), locations (WATER, LAND), and
  locative modifiers LEFT, RIGHT, BOTTOM, and
  SURFACE

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• (1c) Partonomy
• Claim Apes are capable to understand the nature
  of part-whole relationship.
• Partonomy concept in chimpanzee Sarah
• Ability to match pieces and names of fruit to
  intact fruit
• Comprehension of name of" when used as part of
  an ACC phrase
• Partonomy concept in chimpanzees Peony
  Elizabeth
• ability to sort
• plant parts (leaves, stems, seeds, and flowers)
  into a plant class
• animal parts (fur, teeth, hair, and bones) into
  an animal class
• Partonomy concept in spider monkeys (Tomasello
  Call 1997)
• categorization of fruit trees in their
  environment on the basis of the particular type
  of fruit they bore

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• (1d) Social relationship
• Observation A wide variety of non-human primates
  have access to rich knowledge of who is related
  to whom, as well as who is dominant and who is
  subordinate.
• In fact, primate understanding of relational
  categories is said to have evolved first in the
  social domain to comprehend third-party social
  relationships.

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• Kinship relationship in non-primate species
• Captive bat mothers (Dechmann 2005)
• Recognition of pups, although pups do not
  recognize their mothers
• Chimpanzees (Hare et al. 2000)
• Understanding of subordinate-dominant relations
• Ability to play different roles
• Different primate species (Tomasello Call 1994
  Tomasello 2000a)
• Understanding of third-party social relationships
• Understanding and forming of categories of third
  party social relationships
• Redirected aggression
• A1 (or A's kin) is attacked by B, A retaliates by
  attacking B's kin

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• (1e) Possession
• Fitch, Hauser Chomsky (in press)
• animal ownership is influenced by dominance,
  priority of access, value of resource, and
  species-specific rules and exceptions
• ownership concept in some animals with overlap
  with our own
• No indication of a taxonomic relation
  possessor-possessee in any of the animals that
  have been studied!
• ? e.g., Gorilla Koko production of combinations
  such as KOKO PURSE or HAT MINE

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• (1f) Location
• Bottle-nosed dolphins Ake and Phoenix
• Understanding of some kind of locative
  modifier-object construction (Note certainly not
  sufficient evidence)
• Relational sentence transport word or
  destination word modifier
• E.g., PERSON LEFT FRISBEE FETCH (for Ake) and
  FRISBEE FETCH BOTTOM HOOP (for Phoenix)
• Arrangement patterns of the form O1 O2 R
• Use of LEFT and RIGHT as locative modifiers (M)
  before object term, hence M O
• O1 and O2 object terms
• R relational action term
• Exposure (without any training) to expanded
  structures M O1 O2 R and O1 M O2 R

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• Conclusion
• Taxonomic relations are a requirement for there
  to be noun modification and also for noun phrase
  recursion.
• The animals concerned are said to
• both comprehend and produce conglomerations of
  features and assign them to objects
• red and banana in the case of the chimpanzee
  Sarah
• rose and paper in the case of the Grey parrot
  Alex
• have abstract concepts such as red-ness or
  banana-ness

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3. Language-like abilities in animals

• (2) Language-like abilities of some trained
  non-human animals
• to understand salient characteristics of concepts
• to distinguish form-meaning pairings ("words")
• to acquire form-meaning pairings of more than one
  hundred items, including items denoting objects,
  actions, and some numbers
• to handle functional items for negation and
  interrogation
• to have an elementary understanding of the notion
  of deixis
• to use an elementary argument structure
• to acquire some understanding of linear
  arrangement of form-meaning pairings
• to conjoin propositions and/or form-meaning
  pairings
• to acquire some basics of taxonomic hierarchy as
  it manifests itself in inclusion and part-whole
  relations

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4. Conclusion

• The mechanisms underlying human speech perception
  were largely in place before language evolved.
• Several of the core properties of human syntax
  lie within the grasp of other animals.
• Structural features of human languages concern
  primarily apes cognitive abilities rather than
  their communicative abilities.
• The two are not entirely mutually incompatible
  since there is clearly an overlap area
• These abilities correspond at least to one layer
  of human language evolution