LING 350 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Nim Chimpsky, Nicaraguan Sign Language, Kanzi
9 Feb 2020
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Describe the communication system of honeybees and vervet monkeys. Do they follow the 4 characteristics of human language: honeybees communicate the location of a food source by doing a dance that corresponds to direction and distance. Satisfies the characteristic of displacement but not the other 3: vervet monkeys have calls to warn other monkeys of danger. They have different calls for snakes, eagles and leopards. Satisfies the characteristic of arbitrariness only because the calls have no intrinsic connection to the animal. How are they different: see above for explanation on apes. European languages which have similar structures: nicaraguan sign language, children who had never been exposed to language before created their own sign language, used spatial modulation and many other syntactic features common in sign languages. What aspects of language did genie acquire: could acquire vocabulary and basic word order. What aspects of language is genie fail to acquire: fail to acquire morphological and syntactic features of language.
