Logged out
Access All our Essays in an Instant
Swap your work for FREE access, or pay £4.99 for instant access
'How do animal communication systems differ from humans and can primates acquire language?'
Member rating: No Rating | Words: | Submitted: Mon Jun 19 2006
Page Preview
On the left is an image preview of every page of this document, and below are the first 150 words with formatting removed:
'How do animal communication systems differ from humans and can primates acquire language?' Language has always been considered a uniquely human characteristic form of communication; 'mans most important cultural invention, the quintessential example of his capacity to use symbols, and a biologically unprecedented event irrevocably separating him from other animals.' (Pinker 1955) The absence of language is a reflection of what information must be transferred with in the species; constrained to context, stimulus and response there is no need for grammatical accuracy or structure. There is no doubt that some animals have methods of communication; often as unique to their species as language is to man. 'our ability to create and understand sentences is a direct manifestation of innate mechanisms that are uniquely human.... Only humans have the intellectual capacity to create sentences according to any grammar'. (Chomsky 1959) Verbal human communication is possible due to the make up...
To see the full version of this document, and 145,345 others
