The comparative approach
This week’s lecture and associated reading from Fitch were about the comparative approach to studying cognition and communication: understanding the evolutionary history of cognitive capacities and the selection pressures that might have driven their evolution by studying homologous and analogous traits in other species (if you don’t know what that means, this tutorial is an excellent opportunity to find out!). Fitch brings in evidence of the cognitive and communicative capacities of a wide range of species, ranging from species which are closely related to humans (other apes; other primates; other mammals, including e.g. sea lions) to more distantly related species (mainly birds, who are also vertebrates like us but last shared a common ancestor with mammals between 310 and 330 million years ago). In this tutorial we want you to discuss the merits of these various species and clades as comparator groups for understanding the evolution of language in humans.
For this tutorial you will therefore read 2 short papers about communication and vocal learning, in birds (Moorman & Bolhuis, 2013) and chimpanzees (Watson et al., 2015) – note that there are many many species of birds, so we are not strictly comparing like with like here. In the tutorial I’d like you to discuss the relevance and utility of these traits and these species to the study of the evolution of language in humans. You don’t have to agree with the authors of the papers, or with each other! It’s entirely up to your tutors and you to decide how to use the time available in the tutorial, but it might be good to start by collectively summarising the content of the papers, figuring out any confusions about the contents, before discussing merits of songbirds and chimpanzees as comparator species. If you keep track of any questions to bring to the following lecture to ask me, that would be great!
The references for the two readings are below. Moorman & Bolhuis (2013) is behind a paywall but can be accessed online for free from computers on the University network (e.g. either by connecting to eduroam wireless network, or by connecting to the University VPN).
Moorman, S., & Boluis, J. J. (2013). Behavioral similarities between birdsong and spoken language. In J. J. Bolhuis and M. Everaert (Eds.), Birdsong, Speech and Language: Exploring the Evolution of Mind and Brain (pp. 111-124). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Link NB. if you want a more detailed article on the same issues, try this 2010 article by Bolhuis et al. or this 2021 paper by Hyland Bruno et al..
Watson, S. K., Townsend, S. W., Schel, A. M., Wilke, C., Wallace, E. K., Cheng, L., West, V, and Slocombe, K. E. (2015). Vocal Learning in the Functionally Referential Food Grunts of Chimpanzees. Current Biology, 25, 495-499. Link. NB. the analysis on page 2 of this paper is pretty complicated, and I don’t expect you to understand all the methods and stats – focus on the summary of the results the authors provide, and what it means. This paper also provoked a bit of a stramash: if you are interested you can read a commentary and the original authors’ response in the same journal.
All aspects of this work are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.