Group items tagged

good bibliography on primate gesture

Research has shown that primates can produce unique calls for things or events in their environment, such as the arrival of a predator or discovery of high-quality food. Scientists had assumed that referential calls were innate and rigid among nonhuman primates, and not flexible and socially learned as they are among Homo sapiens. Yet, a recent study suggests that primates may, in fact, be able to engage in social learning, acquiring and using another group's sounds.

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

When a human baby is born, its first cry is a normal sign of good health. Having never taken a breath before, the baby signals its first inhalation and exhalation-in the form of a screech. How do babies know to create a sound they've never made before? And is their first yelp truly the start of speech development? As it turns out, human babies may be practicing how to cry long before they ever make a sound. That is, if they're anything like marmosets, humans' primate cousins. A study of marmosets by Daniel Takahashi, a co-author of the study and an animal behaviorist at the Brain Institute at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte in Brazil. shows fetal monkeys practicing crying in the womb. Takahashi notes, "marmosets are monkeys that we know vocalize a lot, and they share a lot of features with humans." For instance, both male and female parents raise their offspring together, and unlike other primates, marmoset babies are relatively helpless when they're born, like human infants. Takahashi says the central finding will help illuminate when speech development begins, and that studying pre-birth-rather than the moment of birth-may help identify speech or motor development problems earlier. "There are a lot of things going on in the womb that might be relevant to what's going on afterwards," he says.

Just a few decades ago, many linguists thought the human brain had evolved a special module for language . It seemed plausible that our brains have some unique structure or system. After all, no animal can use language the way people can. However, in the 1990s, scientists began testing the language-module theory using "functional" MRI technology that let them watch the brain respond to words. And what they saw didn't look like a module, says Benjamin Bergen, a researcher at the University of California, San Diego, and author of the book _Louder Than Words_. "They found something totally surprising," Bergen says. "It's not just certain specific little regions in the brain, regions dedicated to language, that were lighting up. It was kind of a whole-brain type of process." The brain appears to be taking words, which are just arbitrary symbols, and translating them into things we can see or hear or do; language processing, rather than being a singular module, is "a highly distributed system" encompassing many areas of the brain. Our sensory experiences can also be applied to imagining novel concepts like "flying pigs". Our sensory capacities, ancestral features shared with our primate relatives, have been co-opted for more recent purposes, namely words and language. Bergen comments, "What evolution has done is to build a new machine, a capacity for language, something that nothing else in the known universe can do," he says. "And it's done so using the spare parts that it had lying around in the old primate brain."

New research suggests that 3-month-old human babies can use lemur calls as teaching aids. The findings hint at a deep biological connection between language and learning. But not everyone agrees that the new work shows that primate sounds can stimulate a child's linguistic instinct. "This work tells us that sounds that are more like human language are more effective," says , a psychologist at the University of California, Davis. "What is more controversial is why they are effective." She says it's still unclear whether the primate sounds are stimulating some deep linguistic circuit in the brain or just getting the babies to look.

"www.emory.edu/LIVING.../Pollick%20de%20Waal%202007.pdf"

I couldn't get the link to work, but maybe this will: http://j.mp/9e2qBm

Good for some basic definitions but doesn't give links to the actual data they are collecting in their projects.

Not only that, they have distiguished a language system for why certain sounds indicate what rule.

Scientists use language and logic to translate monkey sounds into English and develop linguistic rules for primate dialects. There is a mystery on Tiwai Island. A large wildlife sanctuary in Sierra Leone, the island is home to pygmy hippopotamuses, hundreds of bird species and several species of primates, including Campbell's monkeys.

Other, non-human primates have Broca's and Wernicke's areas in their brains, as do humans. In both species, the Broca's region represents non-linguistic hand and mouth movements. Evidence also suggests that both species may have mirror neurons in this region that are involved in understanding the actions and intentions of others. In both macaques and humans, this region is likely involved in producing orofacial expressions and in understanding the intentions behind orofacial expressions of others. In humans, it has evolved an additional communicative function, namely speech production. Interestingly however, it does not appear to be involved in monkey vocalizations, which are instead mediated by limbic and brainstem areas. In both species, the region represents non-linguistic hand and mouth movements. Evidence also suggests that both species may have mirror neurons in this region that are involved in understanding the actions and intentions of others. In both macaques and humans, this region is likely involved in producing orofacial expressions and in understanding the intentions behind orofacial expressions of others. In humans, it has evolved an additional communicative function, namely speech production. However, unlike in humans, Broca's area does not appear to be involved in monkey vocalizations, which are instead mediated by limbic and brainstem areas. Regarding Wernicke's area, which is responsible for language comprehension in humans, evidence suggests that the left superior temporal gyrus is specialized for processing species-specific calls in macaques, just as it is specialized for speech comprehension in humans.

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.

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

Like a human's brain, a dog's brain responds to the meaning of a word and how the word is said. And like with a human's brain, the dog's left hemisphere reacts to meaning and the right hemisphere reacts to intonation. In the study, words were said to dogs in positive and neutral tones, but only positive words spoken in a positive tone prompted strong activity in the brain's reward center. This study suggested that non-primates could process meaning and emotion long before humans could talk.

"Chimpanzees appear to consider who they are "talking to" before they call out. Researchers found that wild chimps that spotted a poisonous snake were more likely to make their "alert call" in the presence of a chimp that had not seen the threat. This indicates that the animals "understand the mindset" of others."

Psychologists who analyzed video footage of a female chimpanzee, a female bonobo and a female human infant in a study to compare different types of gestures at comparable stages of communicative development found remarkable similarities among the three species. Gestures made by all three species included reaching, pointing with fingers or the head, and raising the arms to ask to be picked up. The researchers called "striking" the finding that the gestures of all three species were "predominantly communicative," Greenfield said. To be classified as communicative, a gesture had to include eye contact with the conversational partner, be accompanied by vocalization (non-speech sounds) or include a visible behavioral effort to elicit a response. The same standard was used for all three species. For all three, gestures were usually accompanied by one or more behavioral signs of an intention to communicate. At the beginning stage of communication development, gesture was the primary mode of communication for human infant, baby chimpanzee and baby bonobo. The child progressed much more rapidly in the development of symbols. Words began to dominate her communication in the second half of the study, while the two apes continued to rely predominantly on gesture. "This was the first indication of a distinctive human pathway to language," Greenfield said. All three species increased their use of symbols, as opposed to gestures, as they grew older, but this change was far more pronounced for the human child. The child's transition from gesture to symbol could be a developmental model of the evolutionary pathway to human language and thus evidence for the "gestural origins of human language," Greenfield said. While gesture may be the first step in language evolution, the psychologists also found evidence that the evolutionary pathway from gesture to human language included the "co-evolution of gestural and vocal communication." Most of the child's gestures were accompanied b

Dr Katie Slocombe and Dr Anne Schel, of the Department of Psychology at York, examined the degree of intentionality wild chimpanzees have over their alarm calls. The study shows that chimpanzees appear to produce certain alarm calls intentionally in a tactical and goal directed way--they are not simply fear-based reactions. In Uganda, the researchers presented wild chimpanzees with a moving snake model and monitored their vocal and behavioural responses. They found that the chimpanzees were more likely to produce alarm calls when close friends arrived in the vicinity. They looked at and monitored group members both before and during the production of calls and critically, they continued to call until all group members were safe from the predator. Together these behaviours indicate the calls are produced intentionally to warn others of the danger. Dr Slocombe said: "These behaviours indicate that these alarm calls were produced intentionally to warn others of danger and thus the study shows a key similarity in the mechanisms involved in the production of chimpanzee vocalisations and human language. "Our results demonstrate that certain vocalisations of our closest living relatives qualify as intentional signals, in a directly comparable way to many great ape gestures, indicating that language may have originated from a multimodal vocal-gestural communication system."