Group items tagged

"Quorum sensing" ; "chemical words"

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.