Animal Communication Versus Human Language English.
The Miracles of Human Language introduces you to the many-faceted study of languages, which has amazed humans since the beginning of history. Together with speakers of many other languages around the world, as well as with famous linguists such as Noam Chomsky and Adele Goldberg, you will learn to understand and analyse how your native tongue is at the same time similar and different from many.
However, there are features of human language which must be satisfied before a type of animal communication can be deemed to be similar to human language. There are five main properties of language, language is creative, highly structured, meaningful, referential and communicative.
Another factor that contributes to why animals cannot learn human language or why people believe they do is due to the anatomic structure of animals and also due to operant conditioning. These factors will prove why animals cannot learn language. Many animals use gestures, grunts, dances, whistles, or even cry to send a message to their other.
In humans the vocal language provides only 10 per cent of how we communicate, body language plays a much higher role, however, both verbal and non verbal language in humans is intentional, communicating about past, present and future, thus defining it as language, whereas in animals this is not always the case, their communication is immediate and relates to issues of immediate importance.
Humans, on the other hand, even in the hunter-gatherer stage, would have benefited enormously from being able to share kind of detailed information about plants and animals and the like, and thus there could have been an evolutionary pressure that drove the development of language. Human language was related to the evolution of the physical.
There are similarities in that both humans and animals communicate with one another, whether that be through sounds, signs, or even body language. However, there are differences that can be found between communicating and actually having a language, as well as a physical uniqueness that makes language possible for human kind.
Animals communicate with each other, and sometimes with us. But that’s where the similarity between animals and us ends, as Jason Goldman explains.