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Origins of Human Language
Consult Hockett’s list of “design features” as provided in Box 2.1 of the textbook. With this list in hand, think about each of the following scenarios involving the communicative behavior of animals, and determine which of Hockett’s features seem to apply. If you cannot tell whether some of the features apply, describe the kind of evidence you would want to see in order to be able to determine whether particular features are present.
Example 1
Your dog is able to obey simple commands such as sit, heel, stay, down and roll over.
Example 2
Your cat is able to persuade you to feed her by circling her empty dish and meowing loudly.
Example 3
According to researchers Stephanie King and Vincent Janik (2013), dolphins are able to invent or learn new “signature” whistles that are used to identify individual dolphins. When the researchers played recordings of signature whistles, dolphins responded to their own signature whistles by calling back with the same sounds, but did not respond to whistles that were not their own.
Reference
King, S. L., & Janik, V. M. (2013) Bottlenose dolphins can use learned vocal labels to address each other. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110, 13216–13221, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1304459110.
Example 4
Animal researcher Con Slobodchikoff has argued that prairie dogs have the most complex communication system that has so far been observed in animals. The following radio story and transcript describes his findings. Based on the information in this recording, discuss which of Hockett’s features seem to apply to prairie dog communication.
https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=132650631