News From Prairie Dog Town

This week ’sNew York Times Sunday Magazine has an article titledCan Prairie Dogs Talk?The answer is so obviouslyno, that one is forced to read it to see what kind of case the author can make. Turns out he makes an interesting one.It is easy to come up with a definition of language that bars prairie-dogese. If you define a language as the set of sentences that can be generated by its syntactical rules, why then the answer is stillno. Prairie dogs do not speak in sentences and appear to have no generative syntax. But I don ’t define language that way.A biologist with the unusual name of Constantine Slobodchikoff has been studying prairie dogs for decades. He has demonstrated that the varmints make a distinct sound when people appear and a different sound when a coyote appears. This kind of thing has long been known about vervet monkeys and suggests the minimum that one can try to pass off as a language.However, the vervet sounds appear to be innate rather than learned and prompt different reactions: tree climbing in case of the leopard warning, ducking under bushes for the hawk or eagle warning, and bolting upright while checking the ground for a snake warning. Maybe these shouts are words, although there is no reason to insist on it. The vervets have a small set of distinctive warnings that produce different responses in the listeners. Perhaps prairie dogs have something similar, except for the fact that their response to pretty much any danger is to run down into their un...
Source: Babel's Dawn - Category: Speech-Language Pathology Authors: Source Type: blogs