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Do animal whisperers really understand what animals are saying? This article explains that it takes more than just watching an animals behavior to understand them. It explains what animal whisperers do and even teaches the reader how to communicate with their animal.

This article discusses human communication with other animals. It states that animals won't be able to remember words like "bacteria" or "economy" because they don't have the brain capacity to understand those words. However, if you tell a dog to "sit", the dog is able to differentiate the sound of that particular word from other verbal signals, and can carry out the action. This is how learning words works. The article also discusses IQ and explains that human brains have been genetically modified for communication, and the size of our brains is also much bigger than expected in animals of the same size.

The article also underscores a quality that differentiates human language from other animal communication: grammatical orderliness. Human languages have word categories such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, and so on. We can modify word order and word endings to create different tenses so that we can describe events from the past or imaginary ones from the future. This grammatical complexity emerges quite early in child development, beginning in the second year of life and exploding with full force in the third year of life. No nonhuman animal to date has demonstrated the ability to construct sentences with the level of grammatical complexity typical of a three-year-old human child.

As animals don't have an actual language with words for them to communicate they have to use their other senses, and in this case it is by sound. Every single animal in the world makes a different sound in order to communicate with their species. By using their distinct sound(s) each animal can "talk" to warn each other of a predator, locate each other, and more.

This article writes about the complexities of animal communication and how elephants are able to use low frequency sounds to stay in touch amongst each other. Generative artificial intelligence is able to help humans generate an algorithm that is capable of detecting animal calls, grumbles, grunts, squeaks etc and translate it into a language that humans are comfortable interpreting.

Scientist study about communication within animals. This is a research primarily on one certain type of animal communicating with the same type of animal, and when, and why they communicate.

Believe it or not, sperm whales communicate with clicking noises-particularly patterns of different clicks referred to as codas. Scientists have found that animal language can be, in fact, complex and structured like our own language. Though it is debated whether or not animals actually have language, researchers continue to explore whether methods such as AI can help garner meanings-if exists-behind animal communication habits.

How do animals communicate with each other? A look at the Lana project, Washoe, a comparison with human communication and evaluation of research.

People have a deep desire to communicate with animals, as is evident from the way they converse with their dogs, enjoy myths about talking animals or devote lifetimes to teaching chimpanzees how to speak. A delicate, if tiny, step has now been taken toward the real thing: the creation of a mouse with a human gene for language.

Animals too rely on structured communication systems to help transmit information. In fact, the ability to communicate information is ubiquitous in the animal kingdom : all life on this planet is able to communicate, both with other individuals of the same species, and with individuals of different species.

Different Ways Animals Communicate

We all try to talk with animals, but very few of us do so professionally. And even fewer are trying to build devices that could allow us to communicate with our pets and farm animals. Meet one person who is trying to do just that: Con Slobodchikoff, a professor emeritus at Northern Arizona University, and a modern-day Dr. Doolittle.

This article describes different forms of language used by animals. It reviews many case studies that investigate the mental capabilities between humans and animals and how effective our forms of communication are.

This article is about how experts believe they have found the 'first compelling evidence' for conformity to linguistic laws in non-primate species. A new study from the University of Torino has found the animals obey some of the same rules of linguistics as humans. The animals follow two main laws - that more frequently used words are briefer (Zipf's law of brevity), and longer words are composed of extra but briefer syllables (the Menzerath-Altmann law). Scientists say this is the first instance of these laws observed outside primates, suggesting an ecological pressure of brevity and efficiency in animal vocalisations.

This article explains the discovery of non-primate animals using similar linguistic rules of human speech. The Zipf and Menzerath-Altmann laws were mentioned, as these are key points of human communication. These patterns were observed in 590 different ecstatic calls of 28 different African Penguins

The urge to converse with animals is age-old, long predating the time when smartphones became our best friends. A new app, is the product of a growing interest in enlisting additional intelligences - machine-learning algorithms - to decode animal communication. The app detects and analyzes cat utterances in real-time, assigning each one a broadly defined "intent," such as happy, resting, hunting or "mating call." It then displays a conversational, plain English "translation" of whatever intent it detects. MeowTalk uses the sounds it collects to refine its algorithms and improve its performance, the founders said, and pet owners can provide in-the-moment feedback if the app gets it wrong. In 2021, MeowTalk researchers reported that the software could distinguish among nine intents with 90 percent accuracy overall. But the app was better at identifying some than others, not infrequently confusing "happy" and "pain," according to the results. Dogs could soon have their own day. Zoolingua, a start-up based in Arizona, is hoping to create an A.I.-powered dog translator that will analyze canine vocalizations and body language. Still, even sophisticated algorithms may miss critical real-world context and cues, said Alexandra Horowitz, an expert on dog cognition at Barnard College. For instance, much of canine behavior is driven by scent. "How is that going to be translated, when we don't know the extent of it ourselves?" Dr. Horowitz said in an email.

Tetsuro Matsuzawa, a Japanese primatologist, has spent 30 years studying our closest primate relative, the chimpanzee, to better understand the human mind. Here are some key takeaways: -Captive chimps can learn sign language or other communication techniques. They also can string together the symbols or gestures for words in simple "Me Tarzan, You Jane" combinations. -The animals use pant-hoots, grunts and screams to communicate. -In decades of ape language experiments, the chimpanzees have never demonstrated a human's innate ability to learn massive vocabularies, embed one thought within another or follow a set of untaught rules called grammar. So yes, chimpanzees can learn words. But so can dogs, parrots, dolphins and even sea lions. Words do not language make. Chimpanzees may well routinely master more words and phrases than other species, but a 3-year-old human has far more complex and sophisticated communication skills than a chimpanzee. "I do not say chimpanzees have language," Matsuzawa stresses. "They have language-like skills." -Monkeys can learn to use tools and do utilize tools, but there doesn't seem to be signs of them "teaching" each other these skills: it's more of a watch, then do situation.

As far as we know, humans are still the only ones with language. But what separates language from communication? Why can't we assume that whales, with their elaborate songs, are simply speaking "whale-ese"? To be considered a true language, there are a few elements that are usually considered to be essential, says Kershenbaum. For one, it must be learned rather than instinctive - both whales and birds have this piece covered. For instance, killer whale calves learn a repertoire of calls from their mothers, and the sounds gradually evolve from erratic screams to adult-like pulsed calls and whistles. What holds whales and other animals back from language is that there is a limit to what they can express. There are only so many calls that each may convey different emotions, but only we have an unlimited ability to express abstract ideas.

There are many laws of linguistics that exist in human communication. Laws such as Zipf's law of abbreviation, which predicts commonly used words to be short, and Menzerath's law, which predicts that large linguistic structures are made of shorter ones. This article talks about a study conducted by a team of researchers from the University of Roehampton, which explores the parallels of these linguistic laws in chimpanzee gestural communication. They measured the length of over 2000 gestures, and found that they indeed used shorter gestures if they were using it more frequently and long gestures were composed of the shorter ones.

This was interesting because the children speak their own animal language.

Strange but true story with interesting connections to the "Genie" case and the critical period hypothesis. In 2008, in Amstedten, Austria, two brothers, age 5 and 18, were discovered. They were being held captive in a cellar with their mother. The boys use animalistic noises rather than words to communicate with each other. Other than their mother, age 42, who'd lost most of her reading and writing skills after being imprisoned 24 years ago, their only source of linguistic input was a TV. A police officer who met the two boys noted they communicate with noises that are a mixture of growling and cooing. "If they want to say something so others understand them as well they have to focus and really concentrate, which seems to be extremely exhausting for them."

This article reminds me of the "Singing Neanderthals" reading that we did. Perhaps whales, like babies, hear tones instead of actual words and can also perceive emotions of other whales they communicate with. If this is so, would this 'tone communication' be considered a language in of itself?

Scientist look into seeing whether or not animals can really communicate with one another. In what scenarios do they communicate, and why.