Prairie Dog Language

I just read an interesting AP article about the work of Northern Arizona University researcher Con Slobodchikoff, who is studying prairie dog "language" (scare quotes mine, and intended to convey skepticism).  The article doesn't mention a recent publication in a journal (the sort of thing that often triggers popular science articles), and Dr. Slobodchikoff's web page doesn't seem to have online versions of his publications, so I haven't read the details of his claims.  However, the AP article contains some eye-openers.

Claims seem to include a sizable lexicon:

Prairie dogs, those little pups popping in and out of holes on vacant lots and rural rangeland, are talking up a storm. They have different "words" for tall human in yellow shirt, short human in green shirt, coyote, deer, red-tailed hawk and many other creatures.

...socio-linguistic behavior:

But Slobodchikoff believes prairie dogs are communicating detailed information to one another about what animals are showing up in their colonies, and maybe even gossiping.

...and a strong version of prairie dog Universal Grammar:

Some of those words or calls were created by the prairie dogs when they saw something for the first time. Four prairie dogs in Slobodchikoff's lab were shown a great-horned owl and European ferret, two animals they had likely not seen before, if only because the owls are mostly nocturnal and this kind of ferret is foreign. The prairie dogs independently came up with the same new calls.

I'll have to hunt up the actual articles and look at Slobodchikoff's evidence for these claims, assuming he's actually making them—since there's a journalist in the loop, there's no knowing how sensationalized or distorted the original research is.

Comments

[language hat]

Having already made known my (extremely skeptical) feelings on the topic of animal language (http://www.languagehat.com/archives/000269.php, http://www.languagehat.com/archives/001114.php), I didn't even bother to blog this latest morsel of journalistic credulity. If it turns out these prairie dogs have epics, blogs, irregular verbs, &c, I will offer them my humble apologies.

[pierre]

I think many people who would agree that there is animal communication, and even animal culture, cavil at the statement that there exists animal language. Why should that be?

I find the solution in William S Burroughs' thesis that written language is altogether different from spoken language, and that furthermore literate human beings in general no longer possess spoken language -- instead they speak a version of "written" language.

If it can be accepted that there is a qualitative difference between essentially written language (whethere written or spoken) and essentially spoken language, then it becomes obvious that essentially written language is an exclusive possession of humans. This observation is the basis of intuitions that animals cannot possess language, or consciousness.

[Nassira]

I'm uncomfortable with Pierre's assertion (credited ultimately to William S. Burroughs) that "essentially written language" is what separates human language (and consciousness) from animal communication.

"literate human beings in general no longer possess spoken language -- instead they speak a version of "written" language"

First off, it seems odd to me to propose that people speak a written language - if I caught anyone speaking the way they wrote, I would assume they were either a nonnative speaker or a particularly pompous intellectual (or would-be intellectual) who hadn't been out of the old ivory tower in quite some time. Perhaps I haven't quite grasped what Pierre and Burroughs mean by this, though.

Second, and more troubling, this entire argument (about what boils down to defining what it means to be human) rests on "literate human beings." That is to say, a relatively small segment of the species, excluding speakers of non-written languages as well as uneducated or print-disabled speakers of languages that do have a written form. Is this really representative of human linguistic capacities?

[pierre]

I should perhaps have made it more clear that my personal sympathies are towards crediting animals with language, intelligence, and consciousness!

I don't recommend anyone reading Burroughs, as his work is deeply unpleasant. But the thesis I describe above is an elaboration of his (more well-known) extended metaphor that language is best understood as a symbiotic viral organism.

To state the thesis in more detail, even the imagined possibility of recording words in writing gives those words a spurious quality of immortality. This quality becomes attached to all subsequent words, whether spoken or written, with extensive psychological consequences. Over time these consequences subconsciously define many of our expectations of language and identity. And clearly, such consequences are not operational among prairie dogs, or apes using sign language, or parrots who can speak in complex sentences.

Thus the common prejudice against acknowledging animal intelligence or language.

[pierre]

"But the thesis I describe above is an elaboration of his (more well-known) extended metaphor that language is best understood as a symbiotic viral organism."

His own elaboration, I hasten to add.

[The Tensor]

I think Nassira has found the flaw in Burroughs's metaphor: there clearly remains a close connection between the language spoken by literate and illiterate English speakers, namely mutual intelligibility, much closer than the connection between "speakers" of written English and written French, for example. Writing is only one encoding of language, and while it's certainly true that there can be a different register associated with the written and spoken forms of a language, this is not necessarily so, and in any case they remain recognizably the same language. (For some value of "same", of course. I might be more amenable to the idea that, for example, written and spoken Japanese are two different languages, because the mapping between the language and the writing system is much less one-to-one than in the case of, for example, Classical Latin.)

I should perhaps note that my personal sympathies are towards killing animals and eating their flesh (because they're so tasty!), so it may be that I'm biased.

[Nassira]

"I should perhaps note that my personal sympathies are towards killing animals and eating their flesh (because they're so tasty!), so it may be that I'm biased."

*shrug* As for me, I don't eat animals, but it's certainly not because they asked me not to.

But my personal sympathies are towards non-written languages, so I get picky about that. ;c)

[pierre]

"while it's certainly true that there can be a different register associated with the written and spoken forms of a language, this is not necessarily so, and in any case they remain recognizably the same language."

You may be correct, but I'd like to suggest that your experience of "recognizably the same language" is colored by the following phenomenon. To the literate, speech is a medium of transmission rather than a matrix of origin. The literate speaker therefore habitually does not "hear" exactly what is said, but automatically translates it into a cleaned-up version as it is heard. In other words there is an assumption that a more perfect version of the spoken text existed in the speaker's intentional mind immediately prior to speaking.

Consider the convenient example of football coach Bill Cowher's press conferences, transcribed faithfully online:

http://www.steelers.com/article/48379/

"The other one he was scrambling and that’s one I wish he would have thrown it away over on the side but he said that he didn’t see the guy until the minute. So you say that and at the same time the guy is pulling it he’s stopping he’s holding it then he comes back out of the hole that you see and runs over here and throws it over here on a third and five and we get seven yards and we get a first down so you say great play. Now, was he supposed to throw it away? So there is a fine line. It’s hard to sit there and question him too much."

If prairie dogs sit around and describe how Bob Prairie Dog from the South Burrow eluded the coyote yesterday, surely it's similar to this!

No disrespect to the finest coach in the NFL. :-)

[The Tensor]

>To the literate, speech is a medium of
>transmission rather than a matrix of origin.
>The literate speaker therefore habitually does
>not "hear" exactly what is said, but
>automatically translates it into a cleaned-up
>version as it is heard. In other words there is
>an assumption that a more perfect version of
>the spoken text existed in the speaker's
>intentional mind immediately prior to speaking.

I disagree with this completely. Literate speakers haven't somehow switched over to composing written language as their primary form of expression. They're putting together spoken language in much the same way as illiterate speakers; it's just that they have also learned an additional skill, that of encoding speech in written form when necessary. I know of no reason so think that the language production of literate and illiterate speakers in different in kind, and I don't believe "there is an assumption that a more perfect version of the spoken text existed in the speaker's intentional mind immediately prior to speaking." Whose assumption is that? If anything, Bill Cowher's speech above shows how a (presumably) literate speaker's speech is *not* structured in polite, well-written sentences.

[pierre]

"If anything, Bill Cowher's speech above shows how a (presumably) literate speaker's speech is *not* structured in polite, well-written sentences."

The point -- which I apologize for expressing badly so far -- is not that the language production of literate and illiterate speakers is different in kind, but that their perception of the nature of language is what differs. Not that literate speakers have switched over to composing written language as their primary form of expression, but that, in many ways, they *believe* they have done so.

Ultimately this is a theory of religious instincts, not of language production.

Haven't you found educated people (perhaps not linguists) to be extremely surprised the first time they see exact transcriptions of their speech? When asked a question like "what did you/he/she say?" or "what are your/his/her thoughts about topic X?" is it thoroughly inaccurate to assert that the instinctive response (among people other than linguists) is to instinctively imagine a tidy text in a platonic space in someone's head? To the extent that this is true, it may have relevance to some of the apparent difficulties in debates regarding animal intelligence.

On the other hand, reviewing this comment thread, I could hardly blame anyone for deciding these ideas are no more than "science fiction".