I think this explanation makes sense, but it raises the further question of why we don’t see other animal species with partial language competency. There may be an anthropic explanation here—i.e. that once one species gets a small amount of language ability, they always quickly master language and become the dominant species. But this seems unlikely: e.g. most birds have such severe brain size limitations that, while they could probably have 1% of human language, I doubt they could become dominant in anywhere near the same way we did.
Can you elaborate more on what partial language competency would look like to you? (FWIW, my current best guess is on “once one species gets a small amount of language ability, they always quickly master language and become the dominant species”, but I have a lot of uncertainty. I suppose this also depends a lot on what exactly what’s meant by “language ability”.)
The ability to create and understand combinatorially many sentences—not necessarily with fully recursive structure, though. For example, if there’s a finite number of sentence templates, and then the animal can substitute arbitrary nouns and verbs into them (including novel ones).
The sort of things I imagine animals with partial language saying are:
There’s a lion behind that tree.
Eat the green berries, not the red berries.
I’ll mate with you if you bring me a rabbit.
“Once one species gets a small amount of language ability, they always quickly master language and become the dominant species”—this seems clearly false to me, because most species just don’t have the potential to quickly become dominant. E.g. birds, small mammals, reptiles, short-lived species..
AFAICT this is highly disputed. Many people think that her handlers had an agenda, and that the purported examples of her combining words were her randomly spamming sign language to get treats. Raw data was never realeased, and no one was allowed to interact with or see them interact with Koko except her handlers.
It seems plausible that the purported examples are a case of selective reporting, wishful thinking, and the Clever Hans effect.
Can you elaborate more on what partial language competency would look like to you? (FWIW, my current best guess is on “once one species gets a small amount of language ability, they always quickly master language and become the dominant species”, but I have a lot of uncertainty. I suppose this also depends a lot on what exactly what’s meant by “language ability”.)
A couple of intuitions:
Koko the gorilla had partial language competency.
The ability to create and understand combinatorially many sentences—not necessarily with fully recursive structure, though. For example, if there’s a finite number of sentence templates, and then the animal can substitute arbitrary nouns and verbs into them (including novel ones).
The sort of things I imagine animals with partial language saying are:
There’s a lion behind that tree.
Eat the green berries, not the red berries.
I’ll mate with you if you bring me a rabbit.
“Once one species gets a small amount of language ability, they always quickly master language and become the dominant species”—this seems clearly false to me, because most species just don’t have the potential to quickly become dominant. E.g. birds, small mammals, reptiles, short-lived species..
AFAICT this is highly disputed. Many people think that her handlers had an agenda, and that the purported examples of her combining words were her randomly spamming sign language to get treats. Raw data was never realeased, and no one was allowed to interact with or see them interact with Koko except her handlers.
It seems plausible that the purported examples are a case of selective reporting, wishful thinking, and the Clever Hans effect.
There are other apes, including Washoe and Kanzi, who have been observed to use language.
Admittedly, they weren’t very good at it by human standards.