So, the next version of Jurassic Park will have a talking velociraptor ?
(More honest question: is there enough info in the skeletons / fossils that we have to exclude the possiblity that birds ancestors could modulate sound enough to have "something" like a language, which would have been "lost" after extinction events ?)
This is already sort of in Jurassic Park 3, which features a 3D-printed velociraptor larynx that can be blown into to reproduce vocalizations remniscent of the velociraptors in the movie. At the end of the movie Alan Grant blows in it, confusing a pack of velociraptors.
There's a specific call that the movie has established as velociraptors in distress calling for help/backup from the pack, and Alan attempted to reproduce it when cornered at the beach to basically bluff/intimidate the pack into avoiding a fight. It coincided with the arrival of a helicopter, and the combined effect made the raptors run away.
Not explicitly a language as such, but specific calls with understandable, relatively complex meaning to the dinosaurs, that can be (sorta) understood and leveraged by humans.
Maybe it goes to show that animals just have some of the same brain structures associated with language that we do. Parrots are capable of rather sophisticated language use, and the informal word-button experiments suggest that non-avian animals like cats and dogs display some linguistic ability. So the bouba-kiki effect in animals shouldn't be terribly surprising. Certain mammals and birds perhaps may best be thought of as prelinguistic.
> the informal word-button experiments suggest that non-avian animals like cats and dogs
I always wanted to see long form content on this. Like I'm sure the cherrypicked clips make it look more impressive than reality but I've owned enough pets to believe they can understand more than just individual words / tone.
Buddhism, Out-of-Africa, Talking Dogs | Robert Sapolsky Father-Offspring Interviews #96
Research implies that - no, pets don't have complex understanding of word combinations, beyond the usual commands. But, in terms of recognizing words individually - some of the gifted ones show abilities on par with 18-month-old humans.
This is downvoted, perhaps as a 'lazy dismissal'? But I read the SciAm article and I don't think it actually explained this point.
The finding seems to be that the bouba-kiki effect is not specific to humans and does not depend on experience. And the previously-existing theory is presented like so:
> scientists have considered [the bouba-kiki effect] a clue to the origin of language, theorizing that maybe our ancestors built their first words upon these instinctive associations between sound and meaning.
The finding is supposed to undermine, or at least challenge, the theory. But why? Is the point just that, if other species also have the bouba-kiki effect but do not have language, the bouba-kiki effect probably doesn't play as important a role as we thought? That seems to be the implication (though the innate/learned distinction also seems to be relevant, and I'm not sure why that is) -- but surely the bouba-kiki effect was never believed to be anything like a sufficient condition for the development of language, was it?
The word "challenge" in the article title is clickbait. I guess the assumption challenged is that this measurable effect is for humans only because we are so special? Good as a headline for a non-science audience that mostly doesn't believe in evolution. It's pretty obvious that our auditory and visual systems are older than humanity as a species. I'd be surprised if the results were anything but confirming. Chickens are not going to learn English. Other species use sound to communicate and that this effect is measurable is pretty cool.
But no serious linguist thinks that kiki-bouba is that important to language. It's a theory that mistakenly thinks that hard problem in language is coming up with words for objects instead of the actually hard problem of combining words in a systematic way.
> But no serious linguist thinks that kiki-bouba is that important to language.
Do you have a source on that? Because I would expect anyone studying sound symbolism to find the bouba-kiki effect extremely important which is probably why it's such a widely cited study, also inside linguistics.
It's hard to find a source for that kind of negative statement.
Kiki-bouba is important for sound-symbolism definitely! But sound-symbolism is marginal when it comes to language. Iconicity and similar things are very interesting phenomena but they're not the difficult part of language at all and they're not necessary parts of language.
Yeah I'm not sure why it's being downvoted, I don't dismiss the study at all (I'm the one who originally posted it!). I just think the scientific reporting on it is very odd. It's an interesting study in terms of what it has to say about innate vs learnt associations.
>scientists have considered [the bouba-kiki effect] a clue to the origin of language, theorizing that maybe our ancestors built their first words upon these instinctive associations between sound and meaning.
I suppose just working in linguistics, I find this such a fringe and unserious theory. The hard part of language isn't associating sounds with objects (dogs can do that), it's putting those words together to make novel meanings.
Fun joke! Eggs are really old evolutionarily. Over 600 million years old if you count preamniotes.
You could still say that's recent on the evolutionary time span, given that life on Earth is ~3.5-3.7 billion years old. (Which is within the same order of magnitude as the age of the universe - which is itself wild to ponder.)
Chickens are a human invention.
It's fun to think about theropod language centers. Raptor kiki bouba.
(More honest question: is there enough info in the skeletons / fossils that we have to exclude the possiblity that birds ancestors could modulate sound enough to have "something" like a language, which would have been "lost" after extinction events ?)
There's a specific call that the movie has established as velociraptors in distress calling for help/backup from the pack, and Alan attempted to reproduce it when cornered at the beach to basically bluff/intimidate the pack into avoiding a fight. It coincided with the arrival of a helicopter, and the combined effect made the raptors run away.
Not explicitly a language as such, but specific calls with understandable, relatively complex meaning to the dinosaurs, that can be (sorta) understood and leveraged by humans.
I always wanted to see long form content on this. Like I'm sure the cherrypicked clips make it look more impressive than reality but I've owned enough pets to believe they can understand more than just individual words / tone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXJfK1wR_w0
Buddhism, Out-of-Africa, Talking Dogs | Robert Sapolsky Father-Offspring Interviews #96
Research implies that - no, pets don't have complex understanding of word combinations, beyond the usual commands. But, in terms of recognizing words individually - some of the gifted ones show abilities on par with 18-month-old humans.
https://youtu.be/jfLAaGtNc7U
The uploader has not made this video available in your country
:( didn’t know that this was a thing
The finding seems to be that the bouba-kiki effect is not specific to humans and does not depend on experience. And the previously-existing theory is presented like so:
> scientists have considered [the bouba-kiki effect] a clue to the origin of language, theorizing that maybe our ancestors built their first words upon these instinctive associations between sound and meaning.
The finding is supposed to undermine, or at least challenge, the theory. But why? Is the point just that, if other species also have the bouba-kiki effect but do not have language, the bouba-kiki effect probably doesn't play as important a role as we thought? That seems to be the implication (though the innate/learned distinction also seems to be relevant, and I'm not sure why that is) -- but surely the bouba-kiki effect was never believed to be anything like a sufficient condition for the development of language, was it?
Do you have a source on that? Because I would expect anyone studying sound symbolism to find the bouba-kiki effect extremely important which is probably why it's such a widely cited study, also inside linguistics.
Kiki-bouba is important for sound-symbolism definitely! But sound-symbolism is marginal when it comes to language. Iconicity and similar things are very interesting phenomena but they're not the difficult part of language at all and they're not necessary parts of language.
>scientists have considered [the bouba-kiki effect] a clue to the origin of language, theorizing that maybe our ancestors built their first words upon these instinctive associations between sound and meaning.
I suppose just working in linguistics, I find this such a fringe and unserious theory. The hard part of language isn't associating sounds with objects (dogs can do that), it's putting those words together to make novel meanings.
You could still say that's recent on the evolutionary time span, given that life on Earth is ~3.5-3.7 billion years old. (Which is within the same order of magnitude as the age of the universe - which is itself wild to ponder.)
Chickens are a human invention.
It's fun to think about theropod language centers. Raptor kiki bouba.