Sunday, December 1, 2013

Preface to "How to Talk to Animals"

My life mission is to find a way to use language to communicate with some species of nonhuman animals.  I specify "language" because language provides communicative power that is far beyond the type of communication with animals that can currently exist.  That is not, however, to say that we cannot communicate with animals.

I will write a blog entry about how to communicate with animals.  First, though, I'd like to give background that is helpful in putting that advice into perspective, and providing evidence that my what I have to say is right.  This post will be a preface to one subsequent that actually gives useful instructions.



So that I can put this into perspective in a concise way, you should already have a few experiences that I'll reference.  Hopefully, you've spent some time with a person with autism, you have tried learning a new language after elementary school, and you've been around both a cat and a dog for some extended duration.

Language comprises of certain components that are all separately studied by linguists.  These components are studied in their abstract essence, using specific languages around the world to figure them out.  This might be a confusing concept:  the Human Language Capacity is universal, and what we think of as "languages" are simply dialects [with an army and navy] that have characteristic qualities and "parameters".  So humans are born with the potential to learn any language, because we have a certain machine in our brain.  That machine is grown with a set of parameters, like "left- or right-branching phrase structure".  Each parameter is like a question on a survey with multiple choices.  As we grow up, we learn from what we hear, filling out those parameters as we go, eventually working out how to use the language to understand others and convey our own thoughts.  Our use starts out awkward and flawed, then we become more comfortable in our respective dialects and work out the nuances of our languages.

The main components of structural linguistics are as follows:  "syntax", or the study of sentence structure; "phonology", which is the study of "phonemes", which are the independent speech sounds that we use to build words; "phonetics", the study of how we physically produce speech; "semantics", which is the study of meaning in words and phrases; "morphology", the study of meaning at the level of parts of words; "pragmatics", the study of how we convey meaning through utterances, and how we take advantage of contextual factors, shared knowledge, and other nonlinguistic factors; and "discourse analysis", the study of meaning in a certain discrete set of linguistic expression, like a book or a speech.  One other important term that comes up all over the place is "prosody", which refers to the tone, pitch, inflection, and all of the other techniques we use to 'sing' a sentence in everyday speech.  Depending on context, the "lexicon" refers to either the set of words that belong to a language, or the set of words that an individual person has in their head for a given language.

Linguists don't necessarily concern themselves with philology or etymology, because those areas of study are more focused on history than cognitive science.  Some linguists study those things, because they are obviously relevant to certain facets of language.

We learn language as children naturally.  Language acquisition is a special kind of learning that is not the same thing as knowledge or skill learning.  Adults are smarter than children, but it is more difficult for them to learn languages.  Children learn languages while they are still pretty unintelligent, but they do so without any guidance.  Learning prescriptive rules is not learning language, it is understanding what is culturally acceptable in a culture that is strict about verbal practice.  So understanding grammar is natural, but understanding English teachers' way of talking about grammar is not.  Prescriptive grammar is also, currently, wrong.  It does not adequately describe the human language capacity as it manifests in any given language.  Not even psycholinguists have all the answers or fully understand how language operates beneath the surface.

Language is not a measure of intelligence.  There are two human diseases that provide evidence for this claim:  Williams Syndrome and Specific Language Impairment.  People with Williams Syndrome are intellectually impaired, but are highly social and have impressive verbal ability.  They are unintelligent, but they use language incredibly well.  On the other hand, people with SLI are intelligent but can't use language very well.  The occurrence of these two diseases constitute "double dissociation" in statistical speak, which is strong evidence that two phenomena are distinct from one another.  In other words, language is not based on intelligence, and vice versa.

The corollary to this double dissociation is that we don't have language because we're more intelligent than other species.

In fact, it's definitely true that we focus on language at the expense of focusing on other things.  When a person loses one sense, their other senses become more astute.  This happens for two reasons:  recruitment of brain structures that no longer have any function for the other senses, which takes weeks at least, and because the elimination of that sense frees up our integrative pathways to process more information from other sensory pathways, a phenomenon which can occur in mere minutes.  The latter mechanism is noteworthy for my purposes, because it provides solid evidence that we can only integrate so much information at once.  That is, I draw from my general psychology education to say that if we are actively using one cognitive faculty to consciously think about something, our focus mechanisms, or integrative pathways, would be blocked from using other cognitive faculties.  Language is such a process which blocks our ability to process other information.  Try the Stroop test if you don't believe me.  So our use of language as an active process in our conscious mental activity comes at the expense of consciously integrating other cognitive mechanisms, such as the ability to read social cues, or to process sensory information, or to think critically.  It's more complicated than I'm letting on, simply because there is always going to be reciprocal stimulation between processes that work well together, such as language and social cues, but the bottom line is that you your capacities for attention and focus are limited.

Perhaps the evolution of our language capacity brought about the demise of some other useful means of communication?  If, at the point that people starting talking to each other using language, they consistently stopped relying on other social cues, and were less able to focus on other neural pathways at any given moment, it's likely that the neural processes which received less conscious attention conferred less evolutionary fitness and were in fact wasteful?  It's common for evolution to weed out things that are useless, or at least diminish their anatomical prominence and render them vestigial.  Maybe our species is now less capable of reading body language and facial expressions than it was before we used language?  It's impossible to deduce, certainly, but there's a lot of circumstantial evidence that this would be the case.

Because any conclusions about animal psychology are tenuous and mired in circumstantial evidence, I think it's completely reasonable to use this line of reasoning to sway our outlook.  We can continue to recognize that our language capacity confers wonderful intellectual coordination and rich social dynamics, while at the same time adopting a greater respect for the differently unique cognitive capacities of other species.  If they are not using language to communicate, they must be using something else.  Mind that this argument can be supported by much research into animal cognition.  Dr. Pepperberg's research is particularly groundbreaking:


Hopefully I can convince you that language is not the only means of communication, and that there are other ways to interact intelligently with nonhumans (and perhaps humans who speak a different language).  Although Alex's linguistic journey has proven that animals are smarter than most people believe, its media coverage doesn't quite capture the richness of the nonverbal communication that animals can access.

I have tried to think about communication as distinct from language, and consequently tried to learn how to communicate with pets.  Maybe you'll be able to apply what I've learned and figure out more.  If there's something I've left out that you find works well, I'd be happy to hear about it.

Without further ado, I present to you "How to Talk to Animals".

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