A number of years ago I was giving a brief talk about the evolution of the brain when someone asked a question I couldn’t answer. It was not a complicated question. It didn’t come from a colleague who had found a weakness in my theory or a graduate student who had read about a new experiment that contradicted my data. It came from a child in my son’s elementary school class. I had given school talks on being a scientist before, and thought I knew what to expect. I never expected an eight-year old to make me doubt myself!
I was talking about brains and how they work, and how human brains are different, and how this difference is reflected in our unique and complex mode of communication: language. But when I explained that only humans communicate with language, the students rebelled.
“But don’t other animals have their own languages?”, one child asked.
This gave me the opportunity to outline some of the ways that language is special: how speech is far more rapid and precise than any other communication behaviour, how the underlying rules for constructing sentences are so complicated and curious that it’s hard to explain how they could ever be learned, and how no other form of animal communication has the logical structure and open-ended possibilities that all languages have. But this was not enough to satisfy a young mind raised on Walt Disney animal cartoons.
“Do animals just have SIMPLE languages”, the child continued.
“No, apparently not”, I explained. “Although other animals communicate with one another, at least within the same species, this communication resembles language only in a superficial way – for example, using sounds, but not that I know of has the equivalents of such things as words, much less nouns, verbs, and sentences. Not even simple ones”.
“Why not?” – asked another child.
The more I thought about it, the more I recognized that I didn’t really have an answer. As far as I could tell, no other scientist had seriously considered the question in this form.
Why are there no simple languages, with simple forms of nouns, verbs and sentences? It ought to be the case: that other animals with simpler minds communicate and reason using simpler languages tha n ours. Why isn’t this so?
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LAZ Simulation Listening Exam 1
– Level B1
Prof. Peter Cullen
Spring 2014
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Name, Date, and Registration Numbe r
Questions: You do not have to use complete sentences! This is a listening exam.
SIMPLE AND CORRECT IS BETTER THAN COMPLICATED AND WRONG.
1. What happened a number of years ago?
2. What had the speaker done before?
3. What made the students rebel?
4. What does no other form of animal communication have?
5. What ought to be the case?
True or False:
Write “True” or “False” in the space next to each statement
1. It was a complicated question.
2. The speaker thought he knew what to expect.
3. A child asked if animals have their own languages.
4. Animal communication resembles language profoundly.
5. Animals use simpler languages than humans.
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LAZ Listening Exam 1 – Level B1
Prof. Peter Cullen
Answer Sheet
1. What happened a number of years ago?
Spring 2014
A number of years ago I was giving a brief talk about the evolution of the brain when someone asked a question I couldn’t answer.
2. What had the speaker done before?
Given school talks
3. What made the students rebel?
Human beings, of course, find such gestures as pointing and pantomiming totally natural and transparent
4. What does no other form of animal communication have? the logical structure and open-ended possibilities that all languages have.
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5. What ought to be the case? that other animals with simpler minds communicate and reason using simpler languages than ours? to understand how humans communicate with one another using a language and how this competence might have arisen in evolution, we must first understand how humans
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5 communicate with one another using natural gestures
True or False: Write “True” or “False” in the space next to each statement
F
T
T
F
F
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