Animal Communication: Signals and Survival

Communication and Language

• Language is being examined in Part 1 of this course.
• Communication involves the exchange of ideas between a sender, such as a speaker, and a receiver, such as a listener.
• Communication satisfies needs and wants, reveals feelings and thoughts, and shares information.
• Communication is any behavior by one organism to influence the emotions, thoughts, or actions of another.
• Vocalizations, facial expressions, body postures, and movements are examples of communication behavior.
• Animals use communication for survival and reproduction, including foraging, avoiding predators, recognizing friends, and finding mates.

Animal Communication

• The honeybee waggle dance conveys key details to other bees.

• Dancing sends messages such as "I have found food," and "There is X much of it," through the vigor of the dance.

• The Y distance away from the hive, as revealed through the the frequency of loops and duration of buzzing.

• Flying direction is communicated regarding a Z direction to get it, along a straight line in move at the angle of food from sun.

• Vervet monkeys use alarm calls, and other Vervet monkeys respond specifically to each type of call.

• Snake calls prompt Vervet monkeys to stand on their hind legs and look around.

• Cat calls prompt Vervet monkeys to climb the nearest tree, while eagle calls trigger them to descend from trees and seek cover.

General Features of Animal Communication Systems

• Animal communication systems have a limited range of expression.
• Bees cannot communicate the specific type of resource they have found.
• Utterances are always holophrases, where a single vocalization or gesture refers to the entire situation.
• In this way, human toddlers exhibits similar holophrases during early language development.
• Animals lack the ability to combine symbols to express novel ideas
• The capacity to combine symbols to convey novel ideas lends human language its expressive ability
• Animal communication is primarily about "here and now" situations.
• Vervet "eagle" communicate an immediate eagle threat, not past sightings.

Design Features of Language

• Human language is a structured system of communication.
• The design features of language include rule-governed structure, generativity, displacement, arbitrariness, dynamic nature, and social sharing.
• Language follows rules about how sounds combine into words (e.g., "sprout" vs. "sprlout") and how words form sentences ("The man has seen the dog." vs. "Seen man the has dog the.").
• Animal communication systems also have rules, as young vervets learn not to make "leopard" calls randomly.
• Recursion allows any component (phrase or sentence) to contain any number of similar components – "Tom likes beans; Susan thinks Tom likes beans" etc.
• Recursion may not be a language universal– Pirahã speakers express "Hand me the nails Dan bought" without recursion e.g. via "Hand me the nails. Dan bought those very nails. They are the same."
• Languages create potentially infinite messages by combining fixed symbols in different patterns.
• Displacement enables reference to events outside the present time and space, using "will, was, -ed, be doing".
• Arbitrariness means symbols bear no resemblance to their referents, as seen across languages (Dog (English), Sobaka (Russian), Inu (Japanese)).
• Language being dynamic means the language changes across time
• Language is socially shared– according to Noam Chomsky it embodies a culture, tradition, community, and history.

Structure of Language

• The structure of human language includes form, content, and use.
• Form includes phonology, morphology, and syntax.
• Content is semantics that covers semantic memory, mental lexicon, and concepts.
• Use focuses on pragmatics.

Language Form: Phonology

• Phonology studies the sound system of a language.
• It involves a phonetic inventory of speech sounds and describing specific sounds.
• Phonemes are speech sound categories that are focused on the meaning of sounds.
• Phonotactic rules govern how speech sounds can form words.
• The sounds /b/ and /p/ in bat and pat differentiate word meaning and are hence contrastive phonemes.
• English phonotactic rules restrict certain consonant clusters.
• After consonants like /b/ and /p/, another stop is not permitted (e.g., bpun).
• No more than 3 consonants allowed in English (e.g., sprout but not sprlirp).

Language Form: Morphology

• Morphology studies morphemes, which are units of meaning, and how they modify communication
• Morphemes can be free(e.g. dog) or bound (e.g. -s)

Language Form: Syntax

• Syntax involves rules for ordering words into "legal" structures for a given language.

Language Content: Semantics

• This involves the meaning of language (words and phrases).
• Sense is described as ≈Dictionary Definitions
• Reference are the pointers (what the words refer to)
• Semantic memory is memory for facts or general knowledge.
• The mental lexicon/lexical (semantic) memory is the mental dictionary and a representational system for words.
• It maintains many items (words, grammar) that must be extremely fast to support speech.

Lexical Semantics (Meaning)

• Lexical Semantics involves the following
• How are word meanings (senses) represented in the mental lexicon
• Introspection involving thinking about word meanings to draw conclusions from subjective experience
• "Definition” hypothesis: word meaning = list of necessary/core features
• These kinds of problems have led many language scientists to abandon the “defining” or “core” features approach to lexical semantics
• Semantic memory: memory for facts or general knowledge about the world,not necessarily tied to language
• Mental lexicon/lexical (semantic) memory; mental dictionary containin many items (words and rules of grammar) with Extremely fast access to support normal speech and normal speech comprehension

Associative Structures of the Mental Lexicon

• Information in semantic memory are represented via connections of units
• A node is the unit of memory
• Nodes have varying connection strength

Collins and Quillian’s (1969) Hierarchical Network Model

• General things reside at the top, specific at the bottom
• Properties at different levels
• Principle of cognitive economy is listing each property as infrequently as possible
• Sentence verification tasks ask participants to decide whether a sentence is true or false, as quickly as possible.
• The assumption is that verification time depends on the underlying structure
• Characteristics are unique to a particular item linked in associative space, with shared items more distantly linked.
• "A canary can sing” is attached as directly to the node, while "A canary can fly" is attached to a node one level up in the hierarchy, hence a difference in verification time.

Collins and Loftus's (1975) Spreading Activation Model

• The mental lexicon is organized semantically based on relatedness or semantic distance
• Spreading activation happens when one node causes activation at other nodes via links
• Spreading activation is automatic: and happens fast and outside conscious control
• Priming happens when: a subject responds faster to a target stimulus, and because a related stimulus appeared in the context.
• "duck” primes “goose”; “horse” does not
• Reaction times to "goose” faster after "duck” than horse
• Mediated priming: lion primes stripes
• There is a limit on the total amount of activation to prevent uncontrolled spread of activation
• Distributional Semantics
• ‘You shall know a word by the company it keeps’
• Words are similar if they have similar word contexts

Concepts and Categories

• A concept is a mental construct that contains information associated with a specific idea and can be concrete objects or abstractions.
• A category are a mental construct referring to a set of objects or ideas that are grouped together or are associated with each other, and are more concrete
• Levels of categorization: categories are nested structures in the level of organization that is important in defining the category .
• There are three such levels: basic, subordinate, and superordinate the basic level is the one we are most likely to invoke Basic-level information is retrieved faster than subordinate or superordinate information
• Family resemblance: membership in a category may be defined by each item’s general similarity to other members in the category rather than by a specific list of features
• Typicality effect: verification times are faster for more typical or representative category members than atypical ones Exemplar and Prototype Theories involving theories on categorization

How does some cognitive ability work?

• Domain general explanations
• Emergence from general-purpose perception, attention, learning, and memory processes
• Externally informed through experience with a structured environment
• Special system explanations Special module with unique processing algorithms Internally pre-structured to sense and use signals

Instance Theory

• A collection of domain-general processing assumptions about how memory functions
• Can be formalized computationally
• Provides a theoretical basis to evaluate potential functional abilities (and limitations) of episodic memory systems Basic instance theory assumptions
• People encode the details of individual experiences
• Lots of cognitive abilities may be understood in terms of processes involved in cued-recall Basic instance theory assumptions retrieve experiences with similar patterns from the past

MINERVA 2

• Minerva 2 is a global-matching model of memory formally evaluated as a computer algorithm
• It evaluates for the following Frequency judgments (Hintzman, 1988) False memory (Arndt, 1998) Selective memory deficits (Curtis & Jamieson, 2019) Age-related memory decline (DRYAD, Benjamin, 2012) Prototype abstraction (Hintzman, 1986) Artificial grammar learning (Jamieson & Mewhort, 2009) Implicit sequence learning (Jamieson & Mewhort, 2009b) Judgments of likelihoods (Dougherty, 1999) Eyewitness identification (Clark, 2003) Lexical access (Goldinger, 1998) Associative learning (MINERVA-AL, Jamieson et al., 2010) Semantic memory (ITS, Jamieson et al, 2018)

Schemas and Scripts

• A schema represents generalized knowledge about an event, person, or situation.
• Scripts are sequences of events tied to common activities with Memory Representation, schemas, and scripts are well-learned patterns that guide our behavior and organize information in memory

Language Use: Pragmatics

• How and why we use language that is social communication
• Language is used for different purposes, changing depending on situation, or following rules" for conversations