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Animal Communication Chapter 1: Animal Communication CHAPTER 1 ANIMAL COMMUNICATION hen Darwin presented his explanation of how living things evolve, he challenged the belief that human beings have a very special, indeed unique place in the universe. Since his time, people have searched for proof of their superiority to other animals. This search has usually focused on the powers of the large human brain, and especially on the ability to use language. “All animal can communicate, but only human beings have language” is a statement that has been made repeatedly in the twentieth century. This claim raises a host of questions. What, for example, is communication, and how does animal communication differ from human communication? What makes language different from the cries of birds? Can apes be taught a language?—and, if so, what does that say about apes and about humans? By looking first at the nature of communication and then at how animals communicate, we can clarify what language is and why the ability to use language is very significant in defining human nature 1 | P a g e Linguistics for English Language Teaching: Sounds, Words, and Sentences Communication and Animals From many legends and folktales, we heard about someone’s extraordinary ability to talk with animals. Sometimes, not only human can talk with animals but animals can talk back to him. Even, many of us, as adults, are still convinced that we can talk with animals, particularly with our pets. “When I tell Kitty to get off the kitchen table, she does.” “Three meows mean hungry.” While we certainly able to communicate with our pets, the question arises as to whether we actually “talk with” them. To consider what “talk with” means, we need to consider what communication is by studying the Message Model. According to this model, communication is a process in which information is transmitted from a source – to sender – to a goal –the receiver, as shown in figure 1 as follows: Figure 1 Process of Communication SENDER CHANNEL RECEIVER MESSAGE SOURCE SIGNAL GOAL THE MESSAGE MODEL Source: Mc Manis et al. (1987: 15) According the Message Model above, a communicator, the sender, thinks up some information at the source, then transmits that information through a signal. The receiver picks up the signal at the message destination and decodes it. The sender and the receiver can exchange positions, and the signal can be manifested in a variety of forms: chemical emission, gesture, sound, etc. On a more technical level, “talk with” means that we have a sender and a receiver and we exchange messages through he medium of sound, more specifically language. When we communicate with our pets, we really do not talk with them as they do not use language to communicate messages back to us, and they may not even function as a sender at all. 2 | P a g e Chapter 1: Animal Communication According to the above model, the communication process involves five steps: 1. Encoding the information into a symbolic system. All communication uses signals or symbols. If a person wants to transmit the information “I am thirsty.” He or she must put that information into the symbolic system of language—in this case, English. 2. Selecting a mode of communication. Next, he or she may choose to verbalize this message, as opposed to writing it or miming it. 3. Delivering the symbols through medium. A medium is the physical basis fro communication, for example light, air, or ink. In this case, the medium is the air which conveys the sound waves of a verbalized message. 4. Perceptual processing of the symbols by the receiver. If the communication is to occur, a receiver must perceive the symbols; the receiver must see or hear or feel the symbols sent. In this example, the human ear receives the sound waves. 5. Decoding of the symbols to obtain the information. Even if the receiver perceives the symbols, nothing is communicated unless the receiver is able to decode the message contained in the sound waves. One assumes that the receiver knows the individual words and grammar of the language, and thus comprehends the message. According to this definition of communication, how do we know when communication has taken place? This question might arise even when considering human communication, but it is especially interesting— and perplexing— when it concerns animal communication. Most animals possess some kind of “signaling” communication system. For examples: Spiders Among the spiders there is a complex system for courtship. The male spider, before he approaches his lady love, goes through elaborate gestures to inform her he is indeed a spider and not a crumb or a fly to be eaten. These gestures are invariant. One never finds a “creative” spider changing or adding to particular courtship ritual of his species. Fiddle Crabs A similar kind of “gesture” language is found among the fiddler crabs. There are forty different varieties, and each species uses its own particular “claw-waving” movement to signal to another member of 3 | P a g e Linguistics for English Language Teaching: Sounds, Words, and Sentences its “clan.” The timing, movement, and posture of the body never change from one time to another within the particular species. Whatever the signal means, it is fixed. Only one meaning can be conveyed. There is not an infinite set of fiddler crab “sentence.” Nor can the signal be “broken down” into smaller elements, as is possible in any utterance of human language. Dogs Let us say we observe two dogs being walked in opposite directions. As they approach and then pass, one, a Pekinese, gives out a fury of yaps with much straining at his leash; the other, a larger nondescript pooch, looks at the yapping Pekinese but otherwise does not respond. Has communication occurred? Even if we stipulate that the Pekinese’s noises are intended as communication—that they do encode some types of information—we cannot then assume that communication has occurred; for communication requires that the goal or the pooch has done so? Swans Let us say there are two swans—A and B. If swan A ruffles its tail feathers and swan B promptly dives, then it seems reasonable to consider the question of what the ruffling of feathers by a swan “says” to another swan. We are not obliged to conclude that this behavior is communicative: in fact, such a conclusion on the basis of one observation would be unwarranted. If, however, we observe time after time that when one swan ruffles its feathers, another swan dives, then the hypothesis that ruffling of feathers by swans in a communicative event becomes increasingly attractive. Honeybees Establishing such a connection between the behavior of one animal and another, however, is far from easy. Karl von Frisch’s studies (1950, 1967) of communication among bees provide a model of how such relationships can be studied. Von Frisch sent decades of his life observing the behavior of bees. Eventually, he came to suspect that certain bee behavior is communicative. To study this behavior, he carefully organized the environment of his bees to elicit the same behavior repeatedly and to evaluate the response of other bees. He established a new source of nectar within the foraging radius of his 4 | P a g e Chapter 1: Animal Communication bee hive and waited for a bee to discover it. After finding the nectar, the bee would return to the hive and go into the “dance.” As an apparent result, other bees would then fly directly to the new source of nectar. This sequence of events happened often enough to permit the tentative conclusion that there was something about the bee’s dance that communicated the location of the source of the nectar. The “language” of the honeybees is far more complex. It is observed through their dances. The dancing behavior may assume one of three possible patterns: round, sickle, and tail-wagging . The determining factor in the choice of dance pattern is the distance of the food source from the hive. The round dance indicates location near the hive, within twenty feet or so. The sickle dance indicates locations at an intermediate distance from the hive, approximately twenty to sixty feet. The tail-wagging dance is for distances that exceed sixty feet or so. The number of repetitions per minute of the basic pattern in the tail-wagging dance indicates the precise distance; the slower the repetition rate, the longer the distance. The bees’ dance is an effective system of communication for bees. It is capable, in principle, of infinitely many different messages, like human language; but unlike human language, the system is confined to a single subject—distance from the hive. The inflexibility was shown by an experimenter who forced a bee to walk to the food source. When the bee returned to the hive, it indicated distance twenty-five times farther away than the food source actually was. The bee had no way of communicating the special circumstances in its message. This absence of creativity makes the bees dance qualitatively different from human language. Dolphin and Whales Dolphin and whales are marine animals. They have ability to make an incredible variety of sound—far more than any other animal, including humans can make. Their low-pitched sounds are believed to function as cetacean sonar; that is, like bats they use echoes to locate objects and to navigate. But even if we subtract these low-pitched sounds, the inventory of sounds that cetaceans might use for communication is staggering. The impulse to conclude that they do communicate with these sounds is very nearly overwhelming.
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