Animals – ISE III Trinity Listening Exam.

Fail

Now listening again with the script

All animals communicate. Crabs wave their claws at each other to signal that they’re healthy and ready to mate. Cuttlefish use pigmented skin cells to create patterns on their skin that act as camouflage or warnings to rivals. Honeybees perform complex dances to let other bees know the location and quality of a food source. All of these animals have impressive communication systems, but do they have language?
To answer that question, we can look at four specific qualities that are often associated with language: discreteness, grammar, productivity, and displacement.

Discreteness means that there is a set of individual units, such as sounds or words that can be combined to communicate new ideas, like a set of refrigerator poetry magnets you can rearrange to create different phrases. Grammar provides a system of rules that tells you how to combine those individual units. Productivity is the ability to use language to create an infinite number of messages. And displacement is the ability to talk about things that aren’t right in front of you, such as past, future, or fictional events. So, does animal communication exhibit any of these qualities?

For crabs and cuttlefish, the answer is no. They don’t combine their signals in creative ways. But some animals actually do display some of these properties.

A chimpanzee named Washoe demonstrated discreteness by combining multiple signs into original phrases, like, “Please open. Hurry.” There are many other examples of sophisticated animal communication, such as in dolphins, which use whistles to identify age, location, names, and gender. They can also understand some grammar in a gestural language researchers use to communicate with them. Bees use the moves, angle, duration, and intensity of their waggle dance to describe the location and richness of a food source. That source is outside the hive, so they exhibit the property of displacement.

While these communication systems may have some of the qualities of language we’ve identified, none display all four. Human language stands alone due to the powerful combination of grammar and productivity, on top of discreteness and displacement. Research continues to reveal more and more about animal communication. It may turn out that human language and animal communication aren’t entirely different but exist on a continuum. After all, we are all animals.

Now listening again with the script

All animals communicate. Crabs wave their claws at each other to signal that they’re healthy and ready to mate. Cuttlefish use pigmented skin cells to create patterns on their skin that act as camouflage or warnings to rivals. Honeybees perform complex dances to let other bees know the location and quality of a food source. All of these animals have impressive communication systems, but do they have language?
To answer that question, we can look at four specific qualities that are often associated with language: discreteness, grammar, productivity, and displacement.

Discreteness means that there is a set of individual units, such as sounds or words that can be combined to communicate new ideas, like a set of refrigerator poetry magnets you can rearrange to create different phrases. Grammar provides a system of rules that tells you how to combine those individual units. Productivity is the ability to use language to create an infinite number of messages. And displacement is the ability to talk about things that aren’t right in front of you, such as past, future, or fictional events. So, does animal communication exhibit any of these qualities?

For crabs and cuttlefish, the answer is no. They don’t combine their signals in creative ways. But some animals actually do display some of these properties.

A chimpanzee named Washoe demonstrated discreteness by combining multiple signs into original phrases, like, “Please open. Hurry.” There are many other examples of sophisticated animal communication, such as in dolphins, which use whistles to identify age, location, names, and gender. They can also understand some grammar in a gestural language researchers use to communicate with them. Bees use the moves, angle, duration, and intensity of their waggle dance to describe the location and richness of a food source. That source is outside the hive, so they exhibit the property of displacement.

While these communication systems may have some of the qualities of language we’ve identified, none display all four. Human language stands alone due to the powerful combination of grammar and productivity, on top of discreteness and displacement. Research continues to reveal more and more about animal communication. It may turn out that human language and animal communication aren’t entirely different but exist on a continuum. After all, we are all animals.

Now listening again with the script

All animals communicate. Crabs wave their claws at each other to signal that they’re healthy and ready to mate. Cuttlefish use pigmented skin cells to create patterns on their skin that act as camouflage or warnings to rivals. Honeybees perform complex dances to let other bees know the location and quality of a food source. All of these animals have impressive communication systems, but do they have language?
To answer that question, we can look at four specific qualities that are often associated with language: discreteness, grammar, productivity, and displacement.

Discreteness means that there is a set of individual units, such as sounds or words that can be combined to communicate new ideas, like a set of refrigerator poetry magnets you can rearrange to create different phrases. Grammar provides a system of rules that tells you how to combine those individual units. Productivity is the ability to use language to create an infinite number of messages. And displacement is the ability to talk about things that aren’t right in front of you, such as past, future, or fictional events. So, does animal communication exhibit any of these qualities?

For crabs and cuttlefish, the answer is no. They don’t combine their signals in creative ways. But some animals actually do display some of these properties.

A chimpanzee named Washoe demonstrated discreteness by combining multiple signs into original phrases, like, “Please open. Hurry.” There are many other examples of sophisticated animal communication, such as in dolphins, which use whistles to identify age, location, names, and gender. They can also understand some grammar in a gestural language researchers use to communicate with them. Bees use the moves, angle, duration, and intensity of their waggle dance to describe the location and richness of a food source. That source is outside the hive, so they exhibit the property of displacement.

While these communication systems may have some of the qualities of language we’ve identified, none display all four. Human language stands alone due to the powerful combination of grammar and productivity, on top of discreteness and displacement. Research continues to reveal more and more about animal communication. It may turn out that human language and animal communication aren’t entirely different but exist on a continuum. After all, we are all animals.

Now listening again with the script

All animals communicate. Crabs wave their claws at each other to signal that they’re healthy and ready to mate. Cuttlefish use pigmented skin cells to create patterns on their skin that act as camouflage or warnings to rivals. Honeybees perform complex dances to let other bees know the location and quality of a food source. All of these animals have impressive communication systems, but do they have language?
To answer that question, we can look at four specific qualities that are often associated with language: discreteness, grammar, productivity, and displacement.

Discreteness means that there is a set of individual units, such as sounds or words that can be combined to communicate new ideas, like a set of refrigerator poetry magnets you can rearrange to create different phrases. Grammar provides a system of rules that tells you how to combine those individual units. Productivity is the ability to use language to create an infinite number of messages. And displacement is the ability to talk about things that aren’t right in front of you, such as past, future, or fictional events. So, does animal communication exhibit any of these qualities?

For crabs and cuttlefish, the answer is no. They don’t combine their signals in creative ways. But some animals actually do display some of these properties.

A chimpanzee named Washoe demonstrated discreteness by combining multiple signs into original phrases, like, “Please open. Hurry.” There are many other examples of sophisticated animal communication, such as in dolphins, which use whistles to identify age, location, names, and gender. They can also understand some grammar in a gestural language researchers use to communicate with them. Bees use the moves, angle, duration, and intensity of their waggle dance to describe the location and richness of a food source. That source is outside the hive, so they exhibit the property of displacement.

While these communication systems may have some of the qualities of language we’ve identified, none display all four. Human language stands alone due to the powerful combination of grammar and productivity, on top of discreteness and displacement. Research continues to reveal more and more about animal communication. It may turn out that human language and animal communication aren’t entirely different but exist on a continuum. After all, we are all animals.