Language and Animals

Psycholinguistics  discussion 1:

1.      -  Is language peculiar to human beings (species specific)?

2.     -  Is it peculiar to human beings because animals do not have a vocal tract like ours or is it because of    something else?

3. 

For this discussion, our group believes that language is peculiar to human beings. As explained in the class by our lecturer, Mr. Yassir that we can use design features made by Charles Hockett in 1963 (Field, 2005). They are as followings: creativity, cultural transmission and displacement. One of them is failed to be fulfilled means that it cannot be said as “language”. Our group members still remember what Mr. Yassir said in the class that every human language is creative. As human beings, we have set of speech sounds referred to as consonants and vowels. They are also called phonemes but we cannot use phonemes separately in our communication because they will be meaningless. But, we can put phonemes together to make “words” and then we can put together those words to make “sentence”. It is the fact that human language can be expressed by using words while animals cannot do this. Although for example, vervet monkeys have a repertoire of 36 vocal sounds (Field, 2005), but they cannot make sentences even words. They only use the sounds to communicate each other. For example when they face the danger coming, they will give alarm to other vervets. Secondly, cultural transmission. It means that a cat will sound “miaow” in everywhere, no matter that the cat comes from England or Indonesia, the cat will produce the same sound. While, a child having Indonesian parents may speak English if the child is brought and lived in Australia for example. As human beings, acquiring the certain language is possible because it depends on the exposure itself. Lastly, In contrast to other animals, humans have a sense of the past and the future. A gorilla, for example, cannot tell his fellows about his parents, his adventures in the jungle, or his experience of the past. Only humans have ability to talk about their past, present and even their dreams or future. In addition, there is a difference in the brain configurations of animals and of human beings that to be noticed. It is the cortex of upper part of the vocalization (Field, 2005). It is useful to control over operations involving vocalization.

Animals do not have vocal tract like ours Denham and Lobeck, 2010). While, an elaborated language requires a highly sophisticated speech organ that will enable the speaker to produce the many differentiated sounds. Only humans are endowed with a speech organ of this complexity. So, it can be said that language is peculiar to human beings.

After watching those videos, Alex the parrot and chimps, it shows that Alex just imitate and mimic the certain words that Alex has learned. It cannot develop its language like as human beings. While chimps, it can be seen from video that the instructors have tried to teach chimps to communicate with humans although they are not capable of producing articulated speech but they understand many spoken words.

In our conclusion, language is peculiar to humans being as stated by Hockett’s design features which describe the basic properties of the rule system shared by all human languages (Field, 2005; Denham and Lobeck, 2010). Last but not least, Psycholinguistics lectured by Mr. Yassir has given our group members knowledge the uniqueness of human language.