PSYC 354 Lecture 5: Animal Communication and Human Language
5 Feb 2019
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Five short answer questions (one or two sentences) Study other species and how they communicate. Use it try and understand more about human language. Some forms of thinking are based on language. Especially for vygotsky, language is foundational for kinds of thinking. Well, it depends on our view of language. Top-up: chomsky; sees language as one whole thing - you either have it or you don"t. Bottom-up: language is a whole collection of skills. Border collies can fetch over a hundred different items; in this sense, they know words. These dogs know what words are associated with which objects. Humans can do all sorts of things with language. One approach is to first define the central characteristics language; we will only look at three that have been discussed: Vervet monkeys (best known example of reference, though many different animal communication systems exhibit reference) Have four different calls depending on what predator is present.
