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Functional Vocalizations by an African Grey Parrot (Psittacus erithacus)
Abstract
An African grey parrot, after 26 months of speech training, has acquired a verbal vocabulary consisting of three color adjectives, two phrases for describing shape, 9 nouns, and functional use of the word “no”. The parrot is capable of correctly combining these vocalizations so as to identify proficiently, request, and/or refuse more than 30 objects by means of verbal labels.
... The Hooper et al. (2006) study shows that vocal imitation in bottlenose dolphins can be enhanced in several ways by increasing the saliency of the sounds to be imitated. Salience of sounds to be imitated can also be enhanced by presenting them as object labels within a model/rival paradigm as was successfully done with an African grey parrot (Psittacus erithacus) by Pepperberg (1981) (see also Todt, 1975). In this paradigm, the African grey parrot observed as a human trainer interacted with another human who served as both model for the parrot and rival for the human trainer's attention. ...
... A common feature of the studies of Pepperberg (1981), Reiss and McCowan (1993), and Hooper et al. (2006) is that saliency of sounds appears to facilitate imitation of those sounds, and that vocal imitation, like occurs in humans first acquiring language (e.g., Bloom, 1970;Bloom et al., 1974;Kuczaj, 1982Kuczaj, , 1987, often begins with partial imitations. However, all three studies were confined to captive situations. ...
... However, all three studies were confined to captive situations. Here, we explore whether known individuals from a resident community of wild Atlantic spotted dolphins (Stenella frontalis) with long-term experience interacting with humans (Herzing 1997, Herzing et al., 2012, will imitate computer-generate sounds that are made salient through a procedure similar to the model/rival paradigm of Pepperberg (1981). ...
computer-generated sounds by wild Atlantic spotted dolphins (Stenella frontalis). Animal Behavior and Cognition, 11(2), 136-166. https://doi. Abstract-Since 1985 a community of wild Atlantic spotted dolphin (Stenella frontalis) have been observed underwater in the Bahamas. A human-worn, acoustic underwater two-way communication interface was developed and deployed from 2013-2016. Dolphins were exposed to an acoustic referentially based wearable underwater computer/interface. A model/rival system was used with dolphins and human participants during in-water sessions. Artificial and natural objects were labeled with computer generated sounds. Female juvenile spotted dolphins dominated the activity. Group size averaged seven dolphins for an average duration of 37 minute over 58 sessions. Of 243 video audio imitations and 56 Cetacean Hearing Augmentation Telemetry (CHAT) audio imitations, six potential response types were documented and measured. Stand-alone vocal contour mimics and Frequency Modulated Contours were the most common imitations. Within 5 sec of a computer-generated sound playing, of the 191 non-stand-alone vocal responses that were produced, 114 of them (59.7%) were judged as partial accurate matches, 3 of them (1.57%) were judged as non-matching partial imitations of a computer-generated sound, 67 of them (35.08%) were signature whistles, and seven of them (3.67%) were either non-signature whistle vocalizations or a mimic of the start or end tones. Thus, the majority of vocalizations produced by the dolphins within five seconds of a computer-generated sound were partial accurate imitations for the computer-generated sound played. Dolphins demonstrated both immediate and delayed vocal imitation and flexible attempts at imitation but did not show signs of a functional understanding of object labels. Atlantic spotted dolphins showed vocal flexibility in reaction to humans broadcasting computer generated sounds.
... Such nonhumans can be tested via the use of interspecies communication [2]. Interspecies communication (a) directly states the precise content of questions to be askedanimals need not determine the nature of a question through hundreds (if not thousands) of instances of trial-and-error learning, thus making the task efficient; (b) incorporates research showing that social animals may respond more readily and accurately within an ecologically valid social context; (c) allows straightforward data comparisons among species, including humans; (d) is an open, arbitrary, creative code with enormous signal variety, enabling an animal to respond in novel, possibly innovative ways that demonstrate greater competence than the required responses of operant paradigms, and allows researchers to examine the exact nature and extent of information an animal perceives; (e) allows rigorous testing that avoids expectation cuing: subjects can be made to choose responses from their entire repertoire rather than from a subset relevant only to a particular topic. ...
... Nevertheless, considerable data existed on the vocal communication abilities of birds in general-with respect to usage and especially for parallels between avian vocal learning and young children's early speech acquisition-and on Grey parrots in particular (reviewed in [5]). Other papers commented upon the exceptional clarity of Grey parrots' reproduction of human speech [8,9], and still other studies documented the intelligence of this particular species (reviewed in [2,5]). Thus, I decided to obtain a Grey parrot and begin its training in a laboratory setting [2]. ...
... Other papers commented upon the exceptional clarity of Grey parrots' reproduction of human speech [8,9], and still other studies documented the intelligence of this particular species (reviewed in [2,5]). Thus, I decided to obtain a Grey parrot and begin its training in a laboratory setting [2]. ...
Simple Summary
Comparing the cognitive capacities of nonhumans to those of humans can be quite difficult, particularly given that humans can be questioned directly (e.g., “How many?”, “What color?”) but that most nonhumans must be tested by various indirect means that might not demonstrate the full range of their capacities. A few nonhumans, however, have acquired some level of symbolic representation (e.g., labels for items such as physical objects and their attributes, for concepts and relations among these items and concepts, and for actions that can be carried out on or with these items), which allows for a limited form of interspecies communication that can be used for direct questioning. Why have so few nonhumans acquired this skill, and what are the advantages of having it? I describe a specific training procedure, the Model/Rival (M/R) protocol, that enabled several Grey parrots to learn some level of referential communication; I discuss the specific elements of such training that are both necessary and sufficient for successful acquisition and how lack of any of these elements can cause failure. I also describe some experiments that were facilitated by interspecies communication, and how acquisition of this ability might affect the extent to which nonhumans can process information.
Abstract
In this paper, I will review the Model/Rival (M/R) technique that has been used to establish interspecies communication with Grey parrots (Psittacus erithacus). I will describe the original format developed by Todt, the relationship to other forms of observational learning outlined by other researchers, and the adaptations that I devised. I will describe how my undergraduate trainers and I isolated the various components that constitute the technique and explain how each is necessary, but how only the combination of all components is sufficient for successful implementation—and how improper implementation can lead to failure. I will briefly summarize the results of proper implementation—including the importance of interspecies communication itself as a technique for studying animal cognition.
... The same considerations hold with respect to spoken words, which can be discriminated by chinchillas (Kuhl & Miller, 1975), by rhesus monkeys (Morse & Snowden, 1975), by parrots (Pepperberg, 1981), and by pet dogs (personal observations). Spoken words differ from one another not only in phonetic but also in acoustic properties, and like any other acoustic stimulus, they can acquire associative meaning for many mammalian and avian species. ...
... In a series of competitive perception experiments with split-brain patients (Levy & Trevarthen, 1976, 1977, 1981Levy, Trevarthen, & Sperry, 1972), we examined hemispheric control of processing and behavior for a wide variety of tasks. Double responses to stimuli in both fields were extremely rare, and on almost every trial of all tasks, patients responded to a stimulus in only one visual half-field, with the stimulus in the other visual halffield ignored. ...
Responds to M. S. Gazzaniga's review of right-hemisphere language in split-brain patients. The present author disagrees with (1) Gazzaniga's assumption that any capacity to extract meaning from spoken or written words is indicative of linguistic competence, and (2) Gazzaniga's claim that the right hemisphere is passive and nonresponsive. The present author provides evidence that, although the right hemisphere is nonlinguistic, it is active, highly intelligent, thinking, conscious, and fully human. (22 ref)
... Many parrot species exhibit a high level of cognitive abilities (Pepperberg, 2017;Habl & Auersperg, 2017;O'Hara et al., 2015) including counting and ordering (Pepperberg & Carey, 2012), the concept of zero (Pepperberg, 2006), identifying shapes and materials by name (Pepperberg, 1987), as well as labeling a wide variety of objects (Pepperberg, 1981), tool-making abilities, puzzle solving skills (Habl & Auersperg, 2017), and a limited form of inference by exclusion (O'Hara et al., 2015). These cognitive abilities are akin to those that are late-developed in human children (Wellman & Miller, 1986). ...
... Here the cockatoo decoded combinations and recombinations of letters distributed throughout three-syllable words and presented in trial pairs. Across species, symbol decoding has been observed, from a handful of symbols such as blanket requests for horses (Mejdell et al., 2016) or food choices for chimpanzees (Hopper et al., 2018) to complex communication training with hundreds of words in bonobos (Rumbaugh, 1977), dolphins (Herman et al., 1984) and African greys (Pepperberg, 1981;Pepperberg, 1987). Symbol learning time varied by species, with horses receiving 14 days of training for 3 symbols (Mejdell et al., 2016) and chimpanzees receiving 1-2 days of training per symbol (Hopper et al., 2018). ...
Symbolic representation acquisition is the complex cognitive process consisting of learning to use a symbol to stand for something else. A variety of non-human animals can engage in symbolic representation learning. One particularly complex form of symbol representation is the associations between orthographic symbols and speech sounds, known as grapheme–phoneme correspondence. To date, there has been little evidence that animals can learn this form of symbolic representation. Here, we evaluated whether an Umbrella cockatoo (Cacatua alba) can learn letter-speech correspondence using English words. The bird-participant was trained with phonics instruction and then tested on pairs of index cards while the experimenter spoke the word. The words were unknown to the bird and the experimenter was blinded to the correct card position. The cockatoo’s accuracy (M = 71%) was statistically significant. Further, we found a strong correlation between the bird’s word-identification success and the number of overlapping letters between words, where the more overlapping letters between words, the more likely the cockatoo answered incorrectly. Our results strongly suggest that parrots may have the ability to learn grapheme–phoneme correspondences.
... In these instances, mimicry of other species often occurs by socialization with them and absence of their own species. Except for parrots, imitation of human speech (Pepperberg, 1981) has been reported in an Asian elephant (Stoeger et al., ...
... Rhesus macaques can be trained to produce specific calls in response to specific visual stimuli (Hage, Gavrilov, & Nieder, 2013; and walruses in response to hand gestures (Schusterman & Reichmuth, 2008). The fact that through VUL such species can be taught to utter par tic u lar vocalizations to request par tic u lar items (Pepperberg, 1981;Richards, 1986) suggests that at least some 2012), bottlenose dolphins (Lilly, 1965), a male harbor seal (Ralls, Fiorelli, & Gish, 1985), and a male beluga whale (Ridgway, Carder, Jeffries, & Todd, 2012). Heterospecific imitation was described in a young Risso's dolphin cross-fostered with bottlenose dolphins (Favaro et al., 2016), a juvenile free-ranging orca separated from its natal group that imitated the barks of sea lions (Foote et al., 2006), and a single African elephant housed with Asian elephants (Poole, Tyack, & Stoeger-Horwath, 2005). ...
A unique overview of the human language faculty at all levels of organization. Language is not only one of the most complex cognitive functions that we command, it is also the aspect of the mind that makes us uniquely human. Research suggests that the human brain exhibits a language readiness not found in the brains of other species. This volume brings together contributions from a range of fields to examine humans' language capacity from multiple perspectives, analyzing it at genetic, neurobiological, psychological, and linguistic levels.
In recent decades, advances in computational modeling, neuroimaging, and genetic sequencing have made possible new approaches to the study of language, and the contributors draw on these developments. The book examines cognitive architectures, investigating the functional organization of the major language skills; learning and development trajectories, summarizing the current understanding of the steps and neurocognitive mechanisms in language processing; evolutionary and other preconditions for communication by means of natural language; computational tools for modeling language; cognitive neuroscientific methods that allow observations of the human brain in action, including fMRI, EEG/MEG, and others; the neural infrastructure of language capacity; the genome's role in building and maintaining the language-ready brain; and insights from studying such language-relevant behaviors in nonhuman animals as birdsong and primate vocalization.
Section editorsChristian F. Beckmann, Carel ten Cate, Simon E. Fisher, Peter Hagoort, Evan Kidd, Stephen C. Levinson, James M. McQueen, Antje S. Meyer, David Poeppel, Caroline F. Rowland, Constance Scharff, Ivan Toni, Willem Zuidema
... Herman (1980) began to show that dolphins could respond to specific cues with specific actions that demonstrated referential comprehension. My parrot started to use the sounds of English speech to identify objects, materials, colors, and shapes (Pepperberg, 1981). We believed that we were gaining valuable insights into the origins of referential communication: if creatures separated by so many years of evolution and with remarkably different-looking brains could all acquire some level of symbolic reference and regular ordering of those symbols, would not that imply the existence of some common origin or convergence? ...
... 8 September 2021 | Volume 12 | Article 647841 them to acquire certain concepts because it allows them to think abstractly; see below) or simply makes it less difficult for humans to interpret the data. In either case, parrots' vocal plasticity allows us to evaluate their abilities because they can be tested via symbolic interspecies communication (Pepperberg, 1981). Interspecies communication (a) directly states the precise content of questions to be asked -animals need not determine the nature of a question through hundreds (if not thousands) of instances of trial-and-error learning, thus making the task efficient; (b) incorporates research showing that social animals may respond more readily and accurately within an ecologically valid social context (Menzel and Juno, 1985); (c) allows facile data comparisons among species, including humans; (d) is an open, arbitrary, creative code with enormous signal variety, enabling an animal to respond in novel, possibly innovative ways that demonstrate greater competence than required responses of operant paradigms, and allows researchers to examine the exact nature and extent of information an animal perceives; (e) allows rigorous testing that avoids expectation cuing: Subjects can be made to choose responses from their entire repertoire rather than from a subset relevant only to a particular topic. ...
Deciphering nonhuman communication – particularly nonhuman vocal communication – has been a longstanding human quest. We are, for example, fascinated by the songs of birds and whales, the grunts of apes, the barks of dogs, and the croaks of frogs; we wonder about their potential meaning and their relationship to human language. Do these utterances express little more than emotional states, or do they convey actual bits and bytes of concrete information? Humans’ numerous attempts to decipher nonhuman systems have, however, progressed slowly. We still wonder why only a small number of species are capable of vocal learning, a trait that, because it allows for innovation and adaptation, would seem to be a prerequisite for most language-like abilities. Humans have also attempted to teach nonhumans elements of our system, using both vocal and nonvocal systems. The rationale for such training is that the extent of success in instilling symbolic reference provides some evidence for, at the very least, the cognitive underpinnings of parallels between human and nonhuman communication systems. However, separating acquisition of reference from simple object-label association is not a simple matter, as reference begins with such associations, and the point at which true reference emerges is not always obvious. I begin by discussing these points and questions, predominantly from the viewpoint of someone studying avian abilities. I end by examining the question posed by Premack: do nonhumans that have achieved some level of symbolic reference then process information differently from those that have not? I suggest the answer is likely “yes,” giving examples from my research on Grey parrots (Psittacus erithacus).
... Despite the notable parallels between bird song learning and human language learning, none of the many studies endeavoring to teach a version of human language to animals have focused on songbirds. This is all the more surprising given the language learning shown by Alex the African Gray Parrot, a member of another avian taxon with vocal learning, the psittacines (Pepperberg, 1981(Pepperberg, , 1987. Moreover, songbirds have strong cognitive capacities, a highly-developed vocal production mechanism, and a vocabulary of basic sound units in their song that rivals or exceeds the basic sound units of human language. ...
... (Savage-Rumbaugh et al., 1993). Pepperberg (1981Pepperberg ( , 1987 and Pailian et al. (2020) have shown that African gray parrots can follow verbal directions to solve difficult problems, including some that challenge humans. Yet despite having the apparent capacities, at least to some extent, no non-human animal uses even a rudimentary language in its day-to-day existence. ...
Individuals of some animal species have been taught simple versions of human language despite their natural communication systems failing to rise to the level of a simple language. How is it, then, that some animals can master a version of language, yet none of them deploy this capacity in their own communication system? I first examine the key design features that are often used to evaluate language-like properties of natural animal communication systems. I then consider one candidate animal system, bird song, because it has several of the key design features or their precursors, including social learning and cultural transmission of their vocal signals. I conclude that although bird song communication is nuanced and complex, and has the acoustic potential for productivity, it is not productive – it cannot be used to say many different things. Finally, I discuss the debate over whether animal communication should be viewed as a cooperative information transmission process, as we typically view human language, or as a competitive process where signaler and receiver vie for control. The debate points to a necessary condition for the evolution of a simple language that has generally been overlooked: the degree of to which the interests of the signaler and receiver align. While strong cognitive and signal production mechanisms are necessary pre-adaptations for a simple language, they are not sufficient. Also necessary is the existence of identical or near-identical interests of signaler and receiver and a socio-ecology that requires high-level cooperation across a range of contexts. In the case of our hominid ancestors, these contexts included hunting, gathering, child care and, perhaps, warfare. I argue that the key condition for the evolution of human language was the extreme interdependency that existed among unrelated individuals in the hunter-gatherer societies of our hominid ancestors. This extreme interdependency produced multiple prosocial adaptations for effective intragroup cooperation, which in partnership with advanced cognitive abilities, set the stage for the evolution of language.
... Potential cases of knowledge of meaning have also been identified in animals who interact regularly with humans, including great apes trained to use and understand either sign-language (Fouts & Fouts 1993), or specially adapted lexigrams (Savage-Rumbaugh, Shanker, et al. 1998); a parrot, Alex, who has demonstrated a remarkable aptitude for using and understanding human words (Pepperberg 1981); and a dog, Rico, who can seemingly understand hundreds of human words, including object names (Kaminski, Call, & Fischer 2004). Taylor 1998). ...
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/animal-communication/
... The aspects of parrot communication, from their intraspecies signaling to their interspecies vocal plasticity [59], suggest a level of cognitive processing that rivals that of primates [65], [68], and human children [61], in some cases outperforming five-year-old children and performing with accuracy comparable to adults (Harvard students) [67]. Advances in cognitive science have shown that corvids and parrots have more densely packed neurons in their brains compared to other birds and some primates, indicating high levels of cognitive ability [55]. ...
... Testing followed the same blind procedures used in all our studies (e.g., Pepperberg, 1981); numerous controls were in place to avoid various types of cuing (see Pepperberg et al., 2008;Pepperberg & Nakayama, 2016). Griffin was shown stimuli monocularly and asked to report vocally what he was seeing. ...
This handbook lays out the science behind how animals think, remember, create, calculate, and remember. It provides concise overviews on major areas of study such as animal communication and language, memory and recall, social cognition, social learning and teaching, numerical and quantitative abilities, as well as innovation and problem solving. The chapters also explore more nuanced topics in greater detail, showing how the research was conducted and how it can be used for further study. The authors range from academics working in renowned university departments to those from research institutions and practitioners in zoos. The volume encompasses a wide variety of species, ensuring the breadth of the field is explored.
... Cases of sign language use have been reported in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes: Gardner & Gardner, 1969), bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus: Herman et al., 1984), and the California sea lion (Zalophus californianus: Schusterman & Krieger, 1984). In addition, cases of human voice use have been reported in the walrus (Odobenus rosmarus: Endo et al., 2020), the parrot (Psittacus erithacus: Pepperberg, 1981), the dog (Canis lupus familiaris: Pilley & Reid., 2011), and others. In another case, a chimpanzee was taught vocabulary using a small piece of plastic (Premack, 1970). ...
The purpose of this study was to examine the responses of a Steller sea lion to two consecutive commands. We conducted this study on one same subject, Hama, as a continuation of Sasaki et al. (2022), which examined whether the Steller sea lion can discriminate human vocal commands. In Sasaki et al. (2022), commands were presented individually to examine the accuracy rate for each command. In the present study, we observed how Hama responded to the rapid presentation of two consecutive commands. The commands were presented in 20 different orders and combinations as 20 command combination patterns using five different commands. The results showed that Hama responded to 12 command combination patterns by performing behaviors corresponding to two consecutive commands. Hama performed the two behaviors in sequence in 8 of the 12 command combination patterns. The responses to the other four command combination patterns were combined single behaviors that combined the behaviors indicated by the two consecutive commands and that were already connected to different single commands. Although the combined single behaviors were not simple combinations of behaviors induced by the two consecutive commands, the combined single behaviors included the common body parts (e.g., fore flippers) or common action types (e.g., rotation) of behaviors induced by each command in the two consecutive commands. These results not only indicate that Hama could understand multiple linguistic information, but also suggest the possibility that Hama spontaneously formed categories based on the learned commands.
... Cases of sign language use have been reported in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes: Gardner & Gardner, 1969), bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus: Herman et al., 1984), and the California sea lion (Zalophus californianus: Schusterman & Krieger, 1984). In addition, cases of human voice use have been reported in the walrus (Odobenus rosmarus: Endo et al., 2020), the parrot (Psittacus erithacus: Pepperberg, 1981), the dog (Canis lupus familiaris: Pilley & Reid., 2011), and others. In another case, a chimpanzee was taught vocabulary using a small piece of plastic (Premack, 1970). ...
The purpose of this study was to examine the responses of Steller sea lions to two consecutive commands. We conducted this study on one same subject, Hama, as a continuation of Sasaki et al. (2022), which examined whether the Steller sea lion can discriminate human vocal commands. In Sasaki et al. (2022), commands were presented individually to examine the accuracy rate for each command. In the present study, we observed how Hama responded to the rapid presentation of two consecutive commands. The commands were presented in 20 different orders and combinations as 20 command combination patterns using five different commands. The results showed that Hama responded to 12 command combination patterns by performing behaviors corresponding to two consecutive commands. Hama performed the two behaviors in sequence in 8 of the 12 command combination patterns. The responses to the other four command combination patterns were combined single behaviors that combined the behaviors indicated by the two consecutive commands and that were already connected to different single commands. Although the combined single behaviors were not simple combinations of behaviors induced by the two consecutive commands, the combined single behaviors included the common body parts (e.g., fore flippers) or common action types (e.g., rotation) of behaviors induced by each command in the two consecutive commands. These results not only indicate that Hama could understand multiple linguistic information, but also suggest the possibility that Hama spontaneously formed categories based on the learned commands.
... Still, some studies on interspecies communication persisted, with a greater focus on reducing unintentional cueing by experimenters. This led to a series of highly controlled laboratory-based studies with speech-trained African grey parrots (e.g., Pepperberg, 1981;Pepperberg & Brezinsky, 1991) and with lexigramtrained chimpanzees and bonobos (Savage-Rumbaugh, 1987;Savage-Rumbaugh et al., 1978. The latter inspired the creation and use of other Augmentative Interspecies Communication (AIC) devices (reviewed in Smith et al., 2023) such as soundboards and keyboards of symbols, with non-signing species such as dolphins (Reiss & McCowan, 1993) and dogs (Rossi & Ades, 2008). ...
The first studies that sought to establish two-way communication between humans and great apes led to important findings but were nevertheless heavily criticized for their training methods, testing procedures, and claims. More recently, hundreds of pet owners around the world have begun training domesticated animals to use Augmentative Interspecies Communication (AIC) soundboard devices, contributing to the first ever large-scale study on interspecies communication. Here, we introduce our scientific approach to our global citizen science project, where we will investigate how dogs and cats use AIC devices, building an incremental research program starting from their associative learning of buttons to determining how AIC device use might impact their welfare and their capacity for symbolic representation. We discuss how our multi-faceted approach can alleviate many of the concerns regarding the original studies performed with apes, achieving larger sample sizes, ample documentation of training techniques, and testing animals’ performance in controlled experimental settings.
... But note the different higher stages of intellectual development: tool use in monkeys and elephants (level 27), recognition of pictures and understanding of words in birds (level 25), and communication of ideas in hymenoptera (level 24). These are congruent with recent data on tool use (Beck, 1980), concept formation in pigeons (Herrnstein, Loveland, & Cable, 1976), parrot language (Pepperberg, 1981), and dancing bees (von Frisch, 1967). ...
An examination of the writings of 19th and early 20th century comparative psychologists indicates that they were well aware of many of the issues raised by the recent “cognitivism” in psychology and ethology. George John Romanes and C. Lloyd Morgan are particularly underappreciated. A survey of current lay attitudes on mental continuity between humans and nonhumans shows that emotional continuity is considered more likely than intellectual continuity and that acceptance of evolution favorably disposes people to both. Critical anthropomorphism often aids in formulating testable hypotheses, but cognitive approaches to animals are in danger of suffering a fate similar to the earlier comparative mentalism.
... Grey parrots in my laboratory generally learn referential English speech (e.g., to comprehend and produce labels for objects, colors, shapes; to answer questions about concepts of number, category, relative size, absence, same/different) via training with the Model/Rival (M/R) procedure (Pepperberg, 1999). This technique, introduced by Todt (1975) and adapted by Pepperberg (1981), involves three-way interactions between two human speakers and the avian student. While the bird watches, two humans handle an object in which the bird has demonstrated interest; one (the trainer) then questions the other (the parrot's model and rival for the trainer's attention) by using phrases like ''What's here?'', ...
Prominent scholars consider the cognitive and neural similarities between birdsong and human speech and language.
Scholars have long been captivated by the parallels between birdsong and human speech and language. In this book, leading scholars draw on the latest research to explore what birdsong can tell us about the biology of human speech and language and the consequences for evolutionary biology. After outlining the basic issues involved in the study of both language and evolution, the contributors compare birdsong and language in terms of acquisition, recursion, and core structural properties, and then examine the neurobiology of song and speech, genomic factors, and the emergence and evolution of language.
ContributorsHermann Ackermann, Gabriël J.L. Beckers, Robert C. Berwick, Johan J. Bolhuis, Noam Chomsky, Frank Eisner, Martin Everaert, Michale S. Fee, Olga Fehér, Simon E. Fisher, W. Tecumseh Fitch, Jonathan B. Fritz, Sharon M.H. Gobes, Riny Huijbregts, Eric Jarvis, Robert Lachlan, Ann Law, Michael A. Long, Gary F. Marcus, Carolyn McGettigan, Daniel Mietchen, Richard Mooney, Sanne Moorman, Kazuo Okanoya, Christophe Pallier, Irene M. Pepperberg, Jonathan F. Prather, Franck Ramus, Eric Reuland, Constance Scharff, Sophie K. Scott, Neil Smith, Ofer Tchernichovski, Carel ten Cate, Christopher K. Thompson, Frank Wijnen, Moira Yip, Wolfram Ziegler, Willem Zuidema
... studies of this kind shifted to examine linguistic abilities via sign language (Fouts, 1973;Gardner & Gardner, 1969;Miles, 1990;Patterson, 1978;Terrace et al., 1979), or mechanical interfaces (Asano et al., 1982;Premack, 1971;Rumbaugh et al., 1973;Savage-Rumbaugh et al., 1978a;Savage-Rumbaugh et al., 1985). Although the animals studied during the second half of the twentieth century were predominantly nonhuman primates, concurrent projects also investigated: vocal speech production and competence in cetaceans (Lilly et al., 1968;Richards et al., 1984) and psittacines (Pepperberg, 1981); gestural competence in pinnipeds (Schusterman & Krieger, 1984) and cetaceans ; and mechanical interface use in cetaceans (Reiss & McCowan, 1993). ...
Countless discussions have been generated by the animal language studies, specifically those utilizing mechanical interfaces, termed here Augmentative Interspecies Communication (AIC) devices (e.g., lexigrams; magnetic chips; keyboards). Overall, three concerns dominate the field: (1) claims that AIC device using animals manifest linguistic skills remain nebulous, and simpler alternative mechanisms have been proposed (e.g., associative learning); (2) such methodology may be unsuitable as some theorize AIC device interfaces are not sufficiently ecologically relevant to foster meaningful use; (3) data may be considered dubious due to potential cueing from experimenters and lack of systematicity in reporting training and performance. Despite such controversy—which eventually led to the field's deterioration around the last quarter of the twentieth century—this research also saw important successes, such as improvements in captive animal welfare, the outcomes of which hold promise for future interspecies communication work.
This article is categorized under: Linguistics > Evolution of Language
... While the ca pacity for equivalence relations does not prove that the sea lions and dolphins did mental ly represent all items in their artificial language, it does support the possibility that they were. Pepperberg (1981Pepperberg ( , 1999 also presented data suggesting, at minimum, contextual/concep tual use of words by Alex. Alex showed a linguistic capability called segmentation, which meant that he could separate out individual referents from a novel phrase and apply them to other items across contexts. For example, he could be taught the phrase "green wood." ...
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... Subject-experimenter relationships: When we are looking not at the cognition animals show in the wild, but at what they can be trained to do (perhaps educated would be a better word), some of the most spectacular claims involve single subjects, or small numbers of subjects, with whom the experimenters have a close social relationship. This was true of most of the early attempts to teach apes language (e.g., Hayes and Nissen 1971;Gardner and Gardner 1969;Savage-Rumbaugh et al. 1986), and also of Pepperberg's work on language-trained parrots (e.g., Pepperberg 1981Pepperberg , 1994. But it is also a feature of much of the work on cognition in cetaceans (reviewed by Herman 2010) and other sea mammals (see the special issue of Animal Cognition 2022 Issue 5: Cognition in marine mammals: The strength of flexibility in adapting to marine life, introduced by Hanke et al. 2022), and in some of the most impressive demonstrations of dog cognition (Kaminski et al. 2004;Pilley and Reid 2011). ...
... In humans: i) simple words develop by 1-1.5 years old, ii) word combinations by 1.5-2.5 years old, iii) the simplest form of syntax-requiring sentences (e.g., that depend on simple syntax rules like word order e.g., subject 1 st , verb 2 nd , and object 3 rd ) do not develop until 2.5-4 years old (Tager-Flusberg et al. 2009), and iv) full syntax ability does not emerge until the syntax-specific neural networks of brain-area BA 44 (Broca's area of the frontal lobe) and its connection to area pSTC (posterior superior temporal cortex, aka Wernicke's area) fully matures at ~10 years old (Friederici et al. 2017). The long delay (~2 years) between first words and first syntax-requiring sentences (i.e., the simple language of young children), and the much longer delay until fully developed hierarchical syntax develops (complex language by age 10), demonstrates the substantial additional cognitive development that was required to expand the simple word-using capabilities deduced here to be present in early H. erectus (and also capable of being taught to non-hominins like large parrots [Pepperberg 1981[Pepperberg , 2002, great apes (sign language words; Perlman 2017 ) and dolphins [Richards et al. 1984]) to the complex language of modern humans. The long delay also supports the conclusion that use of simple learned/phonationrequiring words plausibly evolved, once selectively favored, far in advance of language in the lineages leading to modern humans. ...
When animals evolve sufficient intelligence and dexterity to be able to learn to fabricate utility products (UPs) like tools, the UP's they produce become part of an induced-reproduction system that intrinsically shares many life-like traits with biological organisms, including genome-like fabrication and operation information that is physically-encoded in the animal fabricator’s neural networks. When this set of life- like traits includes a sufficient capacity for system-improving cultural evolution (UP-evolvability), the UPs become ‘para-alive’, i.e., nearly alive, or a form of non-biological UP-paralife that is equivalent to the life- status of biological viruses, plasmids, and transposons. In the companion paper I focus on the evolution of UP-paralife in the context of modern, language-capable humans and its predicted evolution going forward in time (Rice 2022). Here I look backward in time and focus on the origin of UP-paralife and its subsequent coevolution with human intelligence. I begin by determining the pathways leading to the evolution of large brains in the rare lineages of biological life that have sufficient intelligence to learn to fabricate tools –a critical first step in the evolution of UP-paralife. The simplest forms of these learning- based UPs, made by species like chimpanzees and New Caledonian crows, represent only proto-UP- paralife because they lack sufficient UP-evolvability. Expanded UP-evolvability required a combination of three attributes that enabled continuous niche-expansion of the animal fabricator via a new and advanced form of UP-mediated teamwork (TW): i) self-domestication that facilitated TW among low-related individuals, ii) learned volitional words (protolanguage) that represent ephemeral UPs that coordinate TW, and iii) learned fabrication of simple flaked-stone tools with cutting and chopping capabilities (a UP to make other structural UPs) that expanded teammate phenotypes and TW capabilities. This specific triad of attributes is synergistic because each one acts as a TW-enhancer that can gradually erode different components of the three major constraints on TW operation and expansion: too much selfishness, insufficient coordination signals, and insufficient physical traits of teammates. The increase in UP- evolvability was transformative and marked the origin of UP-paralife and the initiation of coevolution between UP-paralife (cultural evolution) and the intelligence of its hominin/human symbiont (genetic evolution) that fostered 2.5 million years of: i) continuous brain size increase and niche-expansion within the genus Homo, and ii) parallel advances in the diversity, complexity and uses of UP-paralife. This coevolution also fostered evolutionary expansion of word-based communication, and eventually language, that acted in a catalyst-like manner to facilitate the evolution of increasingly complex forms of imagination, reasoning, mentalizing, and UP-generating technology. I next focus on the evolution of creativity in the human lineage –in the form of divergent thinking and creative imagination. I conclude that the evolution of this advanced cognitive feature required a preadaptation of sufficient intelligence and is the component of human cognition that was the major causal factor generating the greatly expanded diversity and complexity of UP-paralife currently associated with modern humans. Lastly, I apply my findings to the issue of the prevalence of extraterrestrial intelligent life. I conclude that any exoplanets with detected chemical life will very rarely (e.g., probability ~10-5 for a planet closely matching Earth’s characteristics) have evolved intelligence equalling or exceeding that of humans.
... Finally, and for me most convincingly, the results from language-trained African gray parrots experimentally demonstrate both flexible, context-dependent interpretation of meaning (including adjectives like shape, color, material, and number) and appropriate productive usage of these abstract categories (Pepperberg 1981, Pepperberg & Brezinsky 1991, Pepperberg 1999. Although many parrots learn to imitate speech, the meaningful comprehension and use of words requires special training (the model-rival paradigm), and few parrots have successfully undergone this intensive procedure, which more closely resembles child language acquisition than more typical training procedures (Pepperberg 1985). ...
... Beyond humans, only a handful of species are considered to be vocal learners: cetaceans (Lilly, 1965;Herman et al., 1984;Reiss and McCowan, 1993;McCowan andReiss, 1995a, 1997;Tyack and Sayigh, 1997), birds [passerines, psittacines (Todt, 1975;Pepperberg, 1981), and hummingbirds (Baptista and Schuhma, 1990)], bats (Esser, 1994), elephants (Poole et al., 2005), pinnipeds (Ralls et al., 1985;Stansbury and Janik, 2019), and some non-human primates (Snowdon, 2009;Lameira et al., 2013;Takahashi et al., 2015). Of these, birds, some primates, cetaceans, and notably, humans as well, employ whistled signals to communicate at long distance. ...
Humans use whistled communications, the most elaborate of which are commonly called “whistled languages” or “whistled speech” because they consist of a natural type of speech. The principle of whistled speech is straightforward: people articulate words while whistling and thereby transform spoken utterances by simplifying them, syllable by syllable, into whistled melodies. One of the most striking aspects of this whistled transformation of words is that it remains intelligible to trained speakers, despite a reduced acoustic channel to convey meaning. It constitutes a natural traditional means of telecommunication that permits spoken communication at long distances in a large diversity of languages of the world. Historically, birdsong has been used as a model for vocal learning and language. But conversely, human whistled languages can serve as a model for elucidating how information may be encoded in dolphin whistle communication. In this paper, we elucidate the reasons why human whistled speech and dolphin whistles are interesting to compare. Both are characterized by similar acoustic parameters and serve a common purpose of long distance communication in natural surroundings in two large brained social species. Moreover, their differences – e.g., how they are produced, the dynamics of the whistles, and the types of information they convey – are not barriers to such a comparison. On the contrary, by exploring the structure and attributes found across human whistle languages, we highlight that they can provide an important model as to how complex information is and can be encoded in what appears at first sight to be simple whistled modulated signals. Observing details, such as processes of segmentation and coarticulation, in whistled speech can serve to advance and inform the development of new approaches for the analysis of whistle repertoires of dolphins, and eventually other species. Human whistled languages and dolphin whistles could serve as complementary test benches for the development of new methodologies and algorithms for decoding whistled communication signals by providing new perspectives on how information may be encoded structurally and organizationally.
... How imitations of human speech and other sounds relate to the above-mentioned processes and whether these sounds are generated using a memorized template of such sounds is unclear. The famous grey parrot Alex, for instance, acquired his repertoire of human words not just by imitation of sounds modelled for him, but also by selective reinforcement shaping the production of desired sounds [42]. This suggests that vocal imitations might originate from a combination of processes, as is also suggested by the budgerigar experiments in Manabe et al. [41]. ...
The study of vocal production learning in birds is heavily biased towards oscine songbirds, making the songbird model the reference for comparative studies. However, as vocal learning was probably ancestral in songbirds, interspecific variations might all be variations on a single theme and need not be representative of the nature and characteristics of vocal learning in other bird groups. To assess the possible mechanisms of vocal learning and its evolution therefore requires knowledge about independently evolved incidences of vocal learning. This review examines the presence and nature of vocal production learning in non-songbirds. Using a broad definition of vocal learning and a comparative phylogenetic framework, I evaluate the evidence for vocal learning and its characteristics in non-oscine birds, including well-known vocal learners such as parrots and hummingbirds but also (putative) cases from other taxa. Despite the sometimes limited evidence, it is clear that vocal learning occurs in a range of different, non-related, taxa and can be caused by a variety of mechanisms. It is more widespread than often realized, calling for more systematic studies. Examining this variation may provide a window onto the evolution of vocal learning and increase the value of comparative research for understanding vocal learning in humans.
This article is part of the theme issue ‘Vocal learning in animals and humans’.
... They have also used and manufactured tools [2], and can outperform children in puzzle tasks [12]. Alex, an African grey in the Pepperberg lab, learned and spoke in context more than 100 words [28], identified shapes and numbers by name [29], understood the concept of "zero" [30] and the ordinality of numbers [31]. More recently, Kea have demonstrated statistical inference not only in relative frequencies, but also in physical and social domains [3], and African grey parrots have continued to demonstrate reasoning skills [7], even outperforming children in some tasks [15]. ...
... The subject of such studies, a Grey parrot, Alex, already vocally labeled various objects, their materials, shapes, and colors with 80% accuracy [38]. He could categorize a single-even novel-object in multiple ways: for example, respond 'blue' to 'What color?', 'wood' to 'What matter?', ...
Same/different are complex abstract relations that hold between any two entities. Demonstrating understanding of these concepts requires more than discriminating identity from non-identity and more than success on match-to-sample/nonmatch-to-sample tasks. Even success on relational match-to-sample or analogical reasoning tasks may not provide sufficient evidence for understanding these concepts, because these tasks may be solvable by alternative strategies. Abstract same/different concepts were clearly demonstrated by a parrot in a task that required it to provide a simultaneous inventory of the dimensions on which arbitrary pairs of entities were both same and different.
... The capacity of this auditory memory is similar to other forms of avian memory that have been well quantified, such as spatial memories in food-caching birds (22) or visual memories in pigeons (23). Auditory memories for object labels have also been shown in parrots (24) and in some mammals (25), including the exceptional example of Rico, the border collie, who could correctly fetch ~200 distinct objects on vocal commands (26). We also found that birds make an efficient use of informative trials during their very rapid learning, as they are . ...
Effective vocal communication often requires the listener to recognize the identity of a vocalizer, and this recognition is dependent on the listener’s ability to form auditory memories. We tested the memory capacity of a social songbird, the zebra finch, for vocalizer identities using conditioning experiments and found that male and female zebra finches can remember a large number of vocalizers (mean, 42) based solely on the individual signatures found in their songs and distance calls. These memories were formed within a few trials, were generalized to previously unheard renditions, and were maintained for up to a month. A fast and high-capacity auditory memory for vocalizer identity has not been demonstrated previously in any nonhuman animals and is an important component of vocal communication in social species.
... Is social modelling the key ingredient in song learning? Pepperberg (1981Pepperberg ( , 1985 was the first to propose that the key social component in vocal learning may be the observation by the learner of a vocal interaction between adults, or between an adult and another learner. Extrapolating from a model of social learning in humans -"social modelling" theory (Bandura, 1969) she proposed that observation by the young bird of vocal interactions between individuals who have mastered the communication system might be critical for vocal learning. ...
Laboratory studies have revealed that social factors are key in bird-song learning. Nevertheless, little is known about how or why birds choose the songs they do learn from the many they will hear under natural conditions. We focus on various theories concerning social song learning that have been offered to date, with special attention paid to two axes of social factors. First, does song learning occur via direct interaction of the young bird with song tutors, or via social eavesdropping by the young bird on interacting singers (social modeling of song)? Social modeling, a hypothesis first proposed by Pepperberg (Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie, 55(2), 139-160, 1981), and direct interaction are not mutually exclusive hypotheses, and the evidence we review suggests both play a role in song learning. Second, does song learning occur via interactions with rivals (territorial competitors) or with friends (mutually tolerant or even cooperative territorial neighbors). These are largely mutually exclusive hypotheses, and can really only be tested in the field. There is little evidence on this contrast to date. We review our recent study on song sparrows, which indicates that both the young bird and his primary tutor may benefit from song learning/tutoring. If this mutual benefit result is confirmed by further studies, we believe that song “tutoring” in these cases may be more than a term of convenience: that it may qualify as true teaching.
... This method had been derived from social modeling theories (Bandura, 1971; 768 Mowrer, 1960), first to train vocal patterns (antiphonal duetting) in grey parrots (Todt, 1975). 769 Pepperberg (1981Pepperberg ( , 1994Pepperberg ( , 1999 has championed this technique to teach Alex, an African grey 770 parrot, how to recognize objects by some distinguishing features, such as their name, color, 771 size, shape and quantity, by observing a trainer and a potential competitor engage in 772 conversation about these features. In those experiments, one human is the exclusive 773 cooperative partner (the trainer) of the parrot, while another human acts both as a model for 774 the bird's responses and as a rival for the trainer's attention. ...
Interspecific communication between dogs and humans enables dogs to occupy significant roles in human society, both in companion and working roles. Dogs excel at using human communicative signals in problem-solving tasks, and solicit human contact when unable to solve a problem. Dogs’ sociocognitive behavior likely results from a selection for attention to humans during domestication, but is highly susceptible to environmental factors. Training for particular tasks appears to enhance dog–human communication, but effects may depend on the nature of the relationship determined by their role. Our aim was to examine two types of social cognition (responsiveness to human gestures, and human-directed communicative behavior in an unsolvable task) in pet dogs (n = 29) and detection dogs (n = 35). The groups did not differ in their ability to follow human signals, but pets were less responsive to signals given by a stranger than by their owner. Pets also exhibited more human-directed gazing in the unsolvable task, showing a bias for gazing at their owner compared with the stranger, whereas detection dogs showed greater persistence in attempting to solve the task compared with pets. Thus, different aspects of dogs’ sociocognitive behavior may differentially vary as a function of selection or training for particular roles.
... The Nobel having been awarded exclusively to ethologists did not help matters, nor did the backlash against the mostly-psychologist researchers who had been in charge of the animal language studies. The extent of the schism became personal when I submitted my first paper on functional vocalizations in a Grey parrot (Pepperberg, 1981-a study on referential labeling). American journals-even those ostensibly on the biological side-aware of the storm brewing in the animal language field, wanted nothing to do with it. ...
Forty years ago, Seyfarth, Cheney, and Marler published two papers claiming semanticity for wild vervet monkey alarms calls. The papers arrived at an extremely interesting and active time in the study of animal behavior—a period during which researchers, working both in the laboratory and the field, were trying to learn as much as possible about many forms of nonhuman communication systems, were trying to teach nonhuman subjects aspects of human systems, were delving into many aspects of language evolution, and were engaging in heated debates on all these topics. Having been actively engaged in this area at the time, I present a brief memoir of the period.
... Athena, a female, was 4 years old in June 2017. She had been in the lab since she was about 4 months old and had begun training on referential communication (methodology in Pepperberg, 1981). Both Pepper, a 22-year-old female, and Franco, a 17-year-old male, had also participated in some previous studies and had some limited training on referential communication using the same methodology. ...
... Athena, a female, was 4 years old in June 2017. She had been in the lab since she was about 4 months old and had begun training on referential communication (methodology in Pepperberg, 1981). Both Pepper, a 22-year-old female, and Franco, a 17-year-old male, had also participated in some previous studies and had some limited training on referential communication using the same methodology. ...
Piagetian liquid overconservation was investigated in four grey parrots (Psittacus erithacus). Birds tracked the larger of two quantities that had undergone various manipulations. Experiment 1 involved controls to ensure birds could track movement of the quantities, including direct and diagonal cross-transfers. All birds succeeded. In Experiment 2, different amounts in the same transparent or opaque containers were transferred into containers rigged such that amounts then looked equal. All birds chose the larger amounts after transformation when initial cups were transparent, but were random or had consistent side preferences when initial cups were opaque (thus obscuring quantity differences), showing that they used inferential, not perceptual, information, and that no extraneous cues existed. In Experiment 3, two birds saw different amounts from same-sized transparent or opaque containers transferred to containers of different sizes, rigged such that resultant amounts appeared to fill both cups and in which lesser amounts appeared greater on some trials. The older bird demonstrated full use of inferential abilities; he succeeded in all tasks when initial cups were transparent but, again, had consistent side preferences with initially opaque cups. The younger succeeded in the direct transfers with transparent initial cups but was random or showed a side preference on diagonal-transfer tasks and on all the tasks with opaque initial cups. However, she had no preference for the cup that appeared fuller, suggesting she did not use perceptual cues. Overall, grey parrots appear to understand the constancy of liquids undergoing physical transformation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).
... Vocal imitation requires that the 'pupil' hear an appropriate model and engage in extensive vocal practice and evaluation through auditory feedback, and involves enhanced forebrain control of the vocal organ [26]. In fact, surprisingly few groups of vertebrates learn their species-typical vocalizations: other than for speech learning in humans, evidence of vocal learning exists only in a few different orders of birds (oscine songbirds [27][28][29], parrots [30][31][32] and certain hummingbirds [33]) and of mammals (pinniped carnivores [34], cetaceans [35], bats [36] and elephants [37]). Even then, systematic experimental evidence of the necessity of models, practice and auditory feedback-dependent performance evaluation is lacking in pinnipeds, whales, bats and elephants. ...
Vocalization is an ancient vertebrate trait essential to many forms of communication, ranging from courtship calls to free verse. Vocalizations may be entirely innate and evoked by sexual cues or emotional state, as with many types of calls made in primates, rodents and birds; volitional, as with innate calls that, following extensive training, can be evoked by arbitrary sensory cues in non-human primates and corvid songbirds; or learned, acoustically flexible and complex, as with human speech and the courtship songs of oscine songbirds. This review compares and contrasts the neural mechanisms underlying innate, volitional and learned vocalizations, with an emphasis on functional studies in primates, rodents and songbirds. This comparison reveals both highly conserved and convergent mechanisms of vocal production in these different groups, despite their often vast phylogenetic separation. This similarity of central mechanisms for different forms of vocal production presents experimentalists with useful avenues for gaining detailed mechanistic insight into how vocalizations are employed for social and sexual signalling, and how they can be modified through experience to yield new vocal repertoires customized to the individual's social group.
This article is part of the theme issue ‘What can animal communication teach us about human language?’
... For example, zebra finches can be trained to respond to a conspecific's call (a highly affective stimulus) [31] or to shift the pitch of their vocalizations in an adaptive fashion to avoid disruption [28]. Moreover, an African grey parrot learned to utter human speech sounds to denote objects and categories [32], budgerigars were conditioned to modify their sounds to match a template [33], and bats were trained to elicit social calls in a new context to receive a reward [34]. Despite the undisputed significance of these studies in the realm of vocal-production learning, they do not address the question of volitional vocal control and do not fulfill the list of criteria outlined in the Introduction. ...
Songbirds are renowned for their acoustically elaborate songs. However, it is unclear whether songbirds can cognitively control their vocal output. Here, we show that crows, songbirds of the corvid family, can be trained to exert control over their vocalizations. In a detection task, three male carrion crows rapidly learned to emit vocalizations in response to a visual cue with no inherent meaning (go trials) and to withhold vocalizations in response to another cue (catch trials). Two of these crows were then trained on a go/nogo task, with the cue colors reversed, in addition to being rewarded for withholding vocalizations to yet another cue (nogo trials). Vocalizations in response to the detection of the go cue were temporally precise and highly reliable in all three crows. Crows also quickly learned to withhold vocal output in nogo trials, showing that vocalizations were not produced by an anticipation of a food reward in correct trials. The results demonstrate that corvids can volitionally control the release and onset of their vocalizations, suggesting that songbird vocalizations are under cognitive control and can be decoupled from affective states.
... This method had been derived from social modeling theories (Bandura, 1971;Mowrer, 1960), first to train vocal patterns (antiphonal duetting) in grey parrots (Todt, 1975). Pepperberg (1981Pepperberg ( , 1994Pepperberg ( , 1999 has championed this technique to teach Alex, an African grey parrot, how to recognize objects by some distinguishing features, such as their name, color, size, shape and quantity, by observing a trainer and a potential competitor engage in conversation about these features. In those experiments, one human is the exclusive cooperative partner (the Fig. 7 Total motion of seven dogs during their first attempt at actual data collection. ...
In recent years, two well-developed methods of studying mental processes in humans have been successively applied to dogs. First, eye-tracking has been used to study visual cognition without distraction in unrestrained dogs. Second, noninvasive functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has been used for assessing the brain functions of dogs in vivo. Both methods, however, require dogs to sit, stand, or lie motionless while yet remaining attentive for several minutes, during which time their brain activity and eye movements are measured. Whereas eye-tracking in dogs is performed in a quiet and, apart from the experimental stimuli, nonstimulating and highly controlled environment, MRI scanning can only be performed in a very noisy and spatially restraining MRI scanner, in which dogs need to feel relaxed and stay motionless in order to study their brain and cognition with high precision. Here we describe in detail a training regime that is perfectly suited to train dogs in the required skills, with a high success probability and while keeping to the highest ethical standards of animal welfare—that is, without using aversive training methods or any other compromises to the dog’s well-being for both methods. By reporting data from 41 dogs that successfully participated in eye-tracking training and 24 dogs IN fMRI training, we provide robust qualitative and quantitative evidence for the quality and efficiency of our training methods. By documenting and validating our training approach here, we aim to inspire others to use our methods to apply eye-tracking or fMRI for their investigations of canine behavior and cognition.
... For instance, starlings could acquire rules of recursive patterning after intensive training (Gentner et al., 2006), while cotton-top tamarins had failed (although differences in the protocol prevent more substantial comparisons; Marcus, 2006). Captive bottlenose dolphins and language-trained parrots displayed the ability to understand languages (artificial or natural ones), including abilities of syntactic processing and generalization to syntactically and lexically novel sentences (Herman, Richards, & Wolz, 1984;Pepperberg, 1981;Pepperberg & Pepperberg, 2009, p. 20). Finally some languagetrained grey parrots combined spontaneously morphemes and phonemes and learned to associate them with new objects, suggesting that they attended the segmental structure of their utterances (i.e. ...
It is generally accepted that comparative studies on animal communication can provide insights into the coevolution of social life, vocal communication, cognitive capacities and notably the emergence of some human language features. Recent studies suggested that non-human primates possess combinatorial abilities that may allow a diversification of vocal repertoires or a richer communication in spite of limited articulatory capacities. However, the functions of combined calls and the information that receivers can extract remain poorly understood. This thesis investigated call combination systems in two species of guenons: Campbell’s monkey (Cercopithecus Campbelli) and Diana monkey (Cercopithecus Diana). Firstly, I studied the combinatorial structure and relevance to receivers of combined calls in of both species using playback experiments. Results confirmed the presence of a suffixation mechanism reducing the emergency of danger signaled by calls of male Campbell’s monkeys. Also, they showed that combined calls of females Diana monkeys convey linearly information via their two units, which signal respectively caller’s emotional state and identity. Secondly, focusing on the context associated with the emission of simple and combined female Campbell’s monkey calls, results revealed flexible use of combination reflecting the immediate need to remain cryptic (i.e. simple calls) or to signal caller’s identity (i.e. combined calls). Finally, I compared females’ communication systems of both species to identify their similarities and differences. As predicted by their close phylogenetic relatedness, their repertoires are mostly based on homologous structures. However, the females differ strongly in their use of those structures. In particular, the great number of calls combined by Diana monkeys increases considerably their vocal repertoire compared to Campbell’s monkeys. Given that the combinations are non-random, meaningful to receivers and used flexibly with the context, I propose a parallel with a rudimentary form of semantic morphosyntax and discuss more generally the possible existence of similar capacities in other non-human animals.
Pets using “talking buttons” to ostensibly tell their owner about their thoughts and needs have become a huge success on social media. With buttons that upon activation play a prerecorded message, these devices are marketed as tools in teaching human language to animals in order to allow them to “speak their minds.” This article investigates these practices of technologically mediated human-dog interactions through the analysis of social media videos and examines the claim that these button-based interactions are illustrative of animals’ language acquisition. This article concludes that “talking buttons” in human-dog communication should rather be understood as semiotic assemblages in which meaning is collaboratively constructed through the dynamic, situated interaction of bodies, linguistic resources, objects, and touch.
When addressing preverbal infants and family dogs, people tend to use specific speech styles. While recent studies suggest acoustic parallels between infant- and dog-directed speech, it is unclear whether dogs, like infants, show enhanced neural sensitivity to prosodic aspects of speech directed to them. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging on awake unrestrained dogs we identify two non-primary auditory regions, one that involve the ventralmost part of the left caudal Sylvian gyrus and the temporal pole and the other at the transition of the left caudal and rostral Sylvian gyrus, which respond more to naturalistic dog- and/or infant-directed speech than to adult-directed speech, especially when speak by female speakers. This activity increase is driven by sensitivity to fundamental frequency mean and variance resulting in positive modulatory effects of these acoustic parameters in both aforementioned non-primary auditory regions. These findings show that the dog auditory cortex, similarly to that of human infants, is sensitive to the acoustic properties of speech directed to non-speaking partners. This increased neuronal responsiveness to exaggerated prosody may be one reason why dogs outperform other animals when processing speech.
The cognitive abilities of birds are remarkable: hummingbirds integrate spatial and temporal information about food sources, day-old chicks have a sense of numbers, parrots can make and use tools, and ravens have sophisticated insights in social relationships. This volume describes the full range of avian cognitive abilities, the mechanisms behind such abilities and how they relate to the ecology of the species. Synthesising the latest research in avian cognition, a range of experts in the field provide first-hand insights into experimental procedures, outcomes and theoretical advances, including a discussion of how the findings in birds relate to the cognitive abilities of other species, including humans. The authors cover a range of topics such as spatial cognition, social learning, tool use, perceptual categorization and concept learning, providing the broader context for students and researchers interested in the current state of avian cognition research, its key questions and appropriate experimental approaches.
Do words that are both associatively and taxonomically related prime each other in the infant mental lexicon? We explore the impact of these semantic relations in the emerging lexicon. Using the head‐turn preference procedure, we show that 18‐month‐old infants have begun to construct a semantic network of associatively and taxonomically related words, such as dog‐cat or apple‐cheese. We demonstrate that priming between words is longer‐lasting when the relationship is both taxonomic and associative, as opposed to purely taxonomic, reflecting the associative boost reported in the adult priming literature. Our results demonstrate that 18‐month‐old infants are able to construct a lexical‐semantic network based on associative and taxonomic relations between words in the network, and that lexical‐semantic links are more robust when they are both associative and taxonomic in character. Furthermore, the manner in which activation is propagated through the emerging lexical‐semantic network appears to depend upon the type of semantic relation between words. We argue that 18‐month‐old infants have a mental lexicon that shares important structural and processing properties with that of the adult system.
Syntax famously consists of abstract hierarchical representations. Less famously, most theories of syntax also assume a higher level of abstract representation: one that abstracts over the hierarchical representations. The existence of such representations would imply that, under certain circumstances, speakers should be able to produce syntactic structures they have never been exposed to. We test this prediction directly. In particular, different types of relative clauses have different surface word orders. These may be represented in two ways: with many individual representations, or with one general representation. If the latter, then learning one type of relative clause amounts to learning them all. We teach participants a novel grammar for only some relative clause types (e.g. just subject relative clauses) and test their knowledge of other types (e.g. object relative clauses). Across experiments, participants consistently produced untrained types, providing the first experimental evidence for this higher level of abstract syntactic knowledge.
Analogies, broadly defined, map novel concepts onto familiar concepts, making them essential for perception, reasoning, and communication. We argue that analogy-building served a critical role in the evolution of cumulative culture by allowing humans to learn and transmit complex behavioural sequences that would otherwise be too cognitively demanding or opaque to acquire. The emergence of a protolanguage consisting of simple labels would have provided early humans with the cognitive tools to build explicit analogies and to communicate them to others. This focus on analogy-building can shed new light on the coevolution of cognition and culture and addresses recent calls for better integration of the field of cultural evolution with cognitive science.
Within 51 mo of her arrival in the laboratory the chimpanzee Washoe had acquired 132 signs of Ameslan (American Sign Language) that met criteria of expressive use (as contrasted with the much larger number of signs in her receptive vocabulary). This vocabulary together with the criteria is described here. To study Washoe's use of vocabulary items as sentence constituents, a test based on R. Brown's (see record
1969-02421-001) analysis of replies to "Wh" questions by young children was devised. Because Washoe was maintained under similar conditions, her replies to questions were very similar to the replies of children. In the present investigation, 10 question frames that were typical of the questions asked of Washoe every day were selected. During the 50th and 51st mo of Project Washoe, each of these 10 question frames was used to construct 50 "Wh" questions, varying in text and context. In terms of providing the sentence constituents specified by the different "Wh" questions, Washoe's replies were superior to the replies that have been reported as typical of human children at Brown's Stage III. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Unlike nonhuman primates and some other species used in attempts to condition vocal behavior, certain song birds display considerable facility at vocal imitation in the wild state. Species-specific characteristics of the song of the male white-crowned sparrow are normally acquired by learning from adults. Local song dialects result. Males raised in individual or group isolation developed abnormal songs. Exposure to normal song during a critical period of 10-50 days of age resulted in normal song development and in reproduction of the particular training dialect. Exposure to normal song during the 50-100 day age period shifted subsequent song development in a normal direction, but details of the training song were not reproduced. Exposure before 10 days and after 100 days of age had no effect. Song learning is selective in that exposure to songs of other species of 10-50 days of age had no effect on song development. Sensory rather than motor constraints appear to be responsible for the selectivity. To explain song development, an auditory template is postulated. At the start of the critical period the template is only a crude specification of normal song, but sufficient to exclude songs of other species. In training the specifications of the template become more precise. Vocalizations are matched to the template subsequently by auditory feedback. No extrinsic reinforcement seems to be necessary. Several analogies are drawn between song learning in white-crowned sparrows and speech development in children. (65 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
More than 19,000 multisign utterances of an infant chimpanzee (Nim) were analyzed for syntactic and semantic regularities.
Lexical regularities were observed in the case of two-sign combinations: particular signs (for example, more) tended to occur
in a particular position. These regularities could not be attributed to memorization or to position habits, suggesting that
they were structurally constrained. That conclusion, however, was invalidated by videotape analyses, which showed that most
of Nim's utterances were prompted by his teacher's prior utterance, and that Nim interrupted his teachers to a much larger
extent than a child interrupts an adult's speech. Signed utterances of other apes (as shown on films) revealed similar non-human
patterns of discourse.
Die Individuen von zwei in Gefangenschaft gehaltenen Kolkraben und drei Schamapaaren äußerten häufig dann, wenn sie ihren Partner vermißten, Laute und Gesangsmotive, die sonst hauptsächlich oder ausschließlich von diesem hervorgebracht wurden. Der so „benannte” Vogel kehrte, wenn ihm das möglich war, umgehend zurück, sobald er diese Laute hörte. Grundsätzlich unterscheidet sich dieses „Benennen” erwünschter Objekte offenbar in nichts vom „zweckdienlichen” Sprechen von Papageien, weshalb vermutet wird, daß diese Fähigkeit auch bei ihnen ihre primäre, arterhaltende Funktion im Sozialleben erfüllt. Darüber hinaus legt die Tatsache, daß sich diese Fähigkeit bei voneinander systematisch so fernstehenden Vogelarten ausgebildet hat, die Frage nahe, ob sie auch bei anderen klangnachahmenden Arten solche Aufgaben erfüllen mag. 1962 Blackwell Verlag GmbH
The coming of language occurs at about the same age in every healthy child throughout the world, strongly supporting the concept that genetically determined processes of maturation, rather than environmental influences, underlie capacity for speech and verbal understanding. Dr. Lenneberg points out the implications of this concept for the therapeutic and educational approach to children with hearing or speech deficits.
One hears the view that communication is a purely human prerogative and that, to the extent there is anything remotely similar in animals, the divergence is so great as to constitute a difference in kind rather than just in degree. Yet we take completely for granted the continuity that exists in morphology and physiology. Much of experimental medicine is predicated on that assumption. Why are we so reticent about accepting an equivalent degree of communality at the behavioral level? There are many things for a biologist to wonder at in our language and in many other aspects of human behavior, but I believe we delude ourselves if we think that a complete discontinuity separates us from other animals.
We have developed a method which allowed us to teach Grey Parrots special vocal patterns with a good success. The birds uttered these in antiphonal duets (Fig. 1, Table 1). The duets were performed only between the parrot and its cooperative partner. By experimental auditory stimulation we investigated the conditions of the vocal communication (Fig. 2, Fig. 3). Furthermore we found, that the performance of antiphonal duets obstructed the extension of the vocal repertoire with patterns which could not be learned from the birds' social partners (Fig. 4).
Describes the achievements of a 40-mo-old female chimpanzee, Lana, after 1 yr of language training undertaken by the authors to determine unequivocally, if possible, whether or not the chimpanzee is capable of language and, if it is, to determine its limits. The computer-controlled language, called Yerkish , in which Lana has been trained to communicate, uses a system of geometric patterns (lexigrams) embossed on the surface of keys on a console. The keyboard console now holds 75 keys (Lana usually has at least 50 keys active at any given time) on which the background color designates the class of words to which the lexigram belongs (e.g., animate beings, physical objects, ingestible items, activities, and prepositions). Although the location of the keys is altered regularly, Lana has learned to use successful linguistic expressions with extremely high accuracy to write, read, and communicate with technicians and machine. It is considered that experiments with the chimpanzee will have valuable applications to children learning language, particularly for the mentally retarded human child or other children who have difficulty getting an initial start in language acquisition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Language and its evolutionary origins are examined in the light of empirical data from studies on artificial language acquisition, human language acquisition in the chimpanzee and the definitional problems surrounding language. Rather than providing solutions, questions are raised in regard to the various approaches to the problems of language origin and definitions of language.
The assumption that language acquisition is relatively independent of the amount and kind of language input must be assessed in light of information about the speech actually heard by young children. The speech of middle-class mothers to 2-year-old children was found to be simpler and more redundant than their speech to 10-year-old children. The mothers modified their speech less when talking to children whose responses they could not observe, indicating that the children played some role in eliciting the speech modifications. Task difficulty did not contribute to the mothers' production of simplified, redundant speech. Experienced mothers were only slightly better than nonmothers in predicting the speech-style modifications required by young children. These findings indicate that children who are learning language have available a sample of speech which is simpler, more redundant, and less confusing than normal adult speech.
Thus, each modality has its special advantages and disadvantages. Species that have the necessary sensory equipment tend to
make use of all of the senses that can be used over distances for communication in different situations.
Syntax, intentionality, representational capacity, memory, and intermodal association are major components and prerequisites for language. Each of these is discussed, and for each the differences between primate and nonprimate are noted. Experiments that illustrate the existence of these various functions are described. (28 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
In this Presidential Address the author examines language—limited to the simple, declarative, present tense sentence—from the point of view of a learning psychologist. The basic assumption is "that what the sentence does is to shift or transfer meanings, not from person to person, but from sign to sign within the mind of the recipient." Language is not conditioning alone but requires postulation of a "mediating reaction." Animal communication is limited to thing-thing or thing-sign while human language is sign-sign. "Language is a device whereby another person, on the basis of experience with one reality, may be made to react… somewhat differently toward another reality, without any new direct experience with that reality." 90-item bibliography. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The three sections of this book are devoted to (1) a discussion of the general concepts of drive, directiveness and purpose and instinct, (2) six chapters on general features of the learning process, including habituation, associative learning, latent learning and insight, together with a discussion of physiological mechanisms in learning, and (3) eight chapters devoted to a systematic review of the learning abilities of the main animal groups. In the latter section the European literature of recent years is extensively reviewed. Bibliography and three indices: scientific names of animals, authors cited, and general topical index. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
ZusammenfassungVon den 7 Anstzen zu einer kommenden Vergleichenden Psychologie (des Menschen und der Tiere) mit dem Ziel, nach naturwissenschaftlicher Methode die Stammesgeschichte der psychischen Menschwerdung aufzuweisen, stellt unsere Bemühung um die vorsprachlichen Grundvermögen als gemeinsamen Besitz von Mensch und Tier den jüngsten dar. Unsere bisher vorliegenden Arbeiten an Tauben. Wellensittichen und Dohlen haben zwei solcher Grundvermögen als Vorstufen menschlichen Zhlens aufgedeckt: 1. die Fhigkeit, gleichzeitig nebeneinander gebotene Mengen allein nach der gesehenen Anzahl ihrer Glieder anschaulich zu unterscheiden, 2. in reiner Zeitgestalt „auf x zu handeln”. Beide Vermögen hatten nach bisherigen Ergebnissen die gemeinsame Grenze bei der 6.Die vorliegende Arbeit berichtet über 8276 Versuche (794 Versuchsstunden) an dem zehnjhrigen Kolkraben Jakob nebst einer Aufgabe des Jungtieres „Junge”, anschließend über 41732 Versuche an 320 Menschen, davon 17 Kindern.
The syrinx of the Orange-winged Amazon parrot includes two external tympaniform membranes thought to be involved in sound production. The position of these membranes at the confluence of the bronchial and tracheal lumina requires that during phonation they be driven by a single column of air and by its attending turbulence patterns. Because of this anatomical arrangement, the phonatory output of either right or left syringeal half is grossly affected by denervation of the ipsilateral or contralateral syringial muscles. Following unilateral syringeal denervation the unbalanced oscillation of the two external tympaniform membranes generates noise. Form this we may infer that normally the parrot syrinx acts as a unitary sound source. Syringeal innervation is provided by the tracheosyringealis branch of the hypoglossus nerve. Each tracheosyringealis innervates both syringeal halves. Section of either the right or left tracheosyringealis leads to a minor and temporary change in the structure of vocalization. One week after the operation the vocalizations are delivered as pre-operatively. There is no indication of either right or left hypoglossal dominance in the phonatory control of the parrot syrinx. Other observations presented here are used to speculate on the possible role of the parrot tongue in altering the resonating properties of the nasopharyngeal space and generating speech like formants.
ZusammenfassungDie Individuen von zwei in Gefangenschaft gehaltenen Kolkraben und drei Schamapaaren äußerten häufig dann, wenn sie ihren Partner vermißten, Laute und Gesangsmotive, die sonst hauptsächlich oder ausschließlich von diesem hervorgebracht wurden. Der so „benannte” Vogel kehrte, wenn ihm das möglich war, umgehend zurück, sobald er diese Laute hörte. Grundsätzlich unterscheidet sich dieses „Benennen” erwünschter Objekte offenbar in nichts vom „zweckdienlichen” Sprechen von Papageien, weshalb vermutet wird, daß diese Fähigkeit auch bei ihnen ihre primäre, arterhaltende Funktion im Sozialleben erfüllt. Darüber hinaus legt die Tatsache, daß sich diese Fähigkeit bei voneinander systematisch so fernstehenden Vogelarten ausgebildet hat, die Frage nahe, ob sie auch bei anderen klangnachahmenden Arten solche Aufgaben erfüllen mag.
A science of psychology must assume that behavior is lawful. We recognize diversity, but we assume that both similarity and difference are products of the same fundamental laws that combine and recombine in unique ways to yield the rich diversity of behavior that we observe between and within species. The proper analysis of behavior is not in terms of simpler behavior and more complex behavior or in terms of simpler organisms and more complex organisms, but rather in terms of general functions such as perception and learning that are found in all forms of behavior. We avoid the invention of new laws of behavior for each newly discovered level of complexity in favor of the formulation of more powerful generalizations.
A female lowland gorilla, Koko, has been engaged in an ongoing language program since July 1972 when she was 1 year old. During the first 30 months of training she acquired a vocabulary of 100 words in American Sign Language which she spontaneously combined into meaningful and often novel statements of up to 11 signs in length. The gorilla is using a rapidly expanding vocabulary of signs to express semantic and possibly grammatical relations similar to those expressed by human children in the early stages of language acquisition. Patterns of generalization, gradual increase in mean length of utterance, and innovative use of gestural language are discussed in relation to data available on children and chimpanzees.
Through use of learned symbols, two chimpanzees accurately specified 11 foods by name to one another when the food item's
identity was known by only one. They could not do this when denied use of the symbols. The chimpanzees then spontaneously
requested specific foods of one another by name. Requests resulted in cooperative and reciprocal symbolically mediated food
exchange.
The emergence of symbolic use of word-lexigrams is traced through the course of four experiments with four chimpanzees. The results indicate that it is ill advised to begin language training by introducing the names of objects or their attributes. Training which allowed the subjects to have the machine vend foods, the names of which were on keys, facilitated the discrimination of the lexigrams moreso than did training which called for the labelling of foods held by the experimenter; however, the discriminations so established seemed to be basically associationistic—subjects were not able to use the word symbols appropriately in a communicative manner or to use the words contingent upon the presence or absence of a given food in the dispenser. Subsequent training with verb-object phrases, where the chimpanzees were able to observe all steps in the delivery of foods and drinks contingent upon correct choices among the lexigrams and the formulation of correct requests, fostered the decontextualization of lexigram usage and the symbolic uses of the words used in training. Errorless training procedures were ineffective. By the end of this training the chimpanzees were able to reintegrate and reorganize skills which, initially, had been only partially mastered, and their learning rates of new words and their extended, appropriate use thereof became strongly evidenced. Caution is extended regarding the use of “word” to a response of an ape, be it with a sign of Ameslan, a plastic token, or a lexigram. There are levels of “wordness” and the symbolic, decontextualized level is achieved only through the course of experiences which serve to emphasize the symbol-referent relationship.
A standardized system of gestures provides a means of two-way communication with a chimpanzee.
The following chapter (published) in the Journal of Speech and Hearing Disorder, (1952, 17, 263–268) was prepared for and presented at the 1951 Convention of the American Speech and Hearing Association, in Chicago, as part of a symposium on “Speech Development in the Young Child,” under the chairmanship of Professor George J. Wischer. There I ventured to suggest certain clinical applications of the autism theory of imitation delineated and documented in the preceding chapter. But before perusing the paper as it is reproduced here, the reader is asked to consider the following maximally simple and, hopefully, clear description of the basic principles involved in the autism theory of language learning.
An abridgment of this article was presented at the annual meeting of the American Speech and Hearing Association, November, 1956, in Chicago. An unabridged version was later published in the Journal of Speech and Hearing Disorders, 1958, 23, 143–152.
Two male and two female chimpanzees were each taught ten signs of American Sign Language. The acquisition rates of the signs were compared on the basis of the number of minutes required in training to reach a criterion of five consecutive unprompted correct responses. After the ten signs had been acquired, the chimpanzees were tested in a double-blind procedure for nine of the signs. All four chimpanzees acquired all of the signs. Some signs were consistently easier to acquire than others, and individual differences between the four chimpanzees were found in the acquisition rates and tests.
In a sequel to Project Washoe, chimpanzees are being taught American Sign Language from birth by humans who are fluent in the language, including persons who are themselves deaf or whose parents were deaf. The first two subjects began to use signs when they were 3 months old, and these early results indicate that the new conditions are significantly superior to the conditions of Project Washoe. More valid comparisons can now be made between the acquisition of language by children and by chimpanzees.
Four studies revealed that a 2½-year-old chimpanzee (Pan), after 6 months of computer-controlled language training, proficiently reads projected word-characters that constitute the
beginnings of sentences and, in accordance with their meanings and serial order, either finishes the sentences for reward
or rejects them.