Language-trained animals
In lecture this week we talked about the language learning capacities of non-humans, including their vocal learning ability and their capacity to learn simple syntactic rules (focussing on a couple of artificial grammar learning experiments, which are used to investigate the learning of combinatorial constraints on the combination of meaningless elements). In this tutorial you’ll take a look at a couple of papers on the adjacent topic of “animal language” experiments, where experimenters try to train non-human animals on various kinds of language-like communication systems, often in a somewhat uncontrolled way (at least relative to artificial grammar paradigms). Tomasello (2017) offers a sympathetic review of some studies using great apes, and Smith et al. (2023) provide a more general overview touching on some of the methods and controversies in the field.
Read at least one of these papers, which as usual you can access through the links below if you are on the University network. If you are in the mood for a rather disturbing 90 minutes one evening and have £2 to spare you could also watch Project Nim, a movie about one of the well-known ape language studies mentioned in these papers.
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