The Centre for Language and Linguistics is to host two events next week on primate communication. The first event is a film screening of Project Nim on Tuesday 1 December at 4pm in the Lupino Cinema, with a guest lecture entitled ‘Functionally Referential Communication in Non-Human Primates: An Evolutionary Stepping-Stone to Language?’ by Dr Brandon Wheeler (School of Anthropology and Conservation, University of Kent), on Wednesday 2 December at 5pm in Darwin Lecture Theatre 2.
Project Nim is a documentary which tells the story of a chimpanzee taken from its mother at birth and raised like a human child by an American family in the 1970s. Highly intelligent, Nim Chimpsky was chosen to be the subject of a language experiment at Columbia University that aimed to discover whether or not chimpanzees could use grammar to create sentences if they were taught sign language and nurtured in a similar environment to human children. His name is a pun on Noam Chomsky, the linguist who theorised that language is unique to humans, which the experiment hoped to disprove.
The screening is free to attend but you need to register via EventBrit here, as places are limited.
In his subsequent lecture, Dr Brandon Wheeler will explore the evolutionary origins of human language in the communication systems of our closest living relatives, primates. A turning point in the study of primate communication was the discovery of the alarm call system of vervet monkeys: different predators (eagles, leopards and snakes) elicit different call types, and listeners respond to each call type with predator-specific responses. As these context-specific calls seemed to function much like words denoting each predator type, they were deemed ‘functionally referential’ and widely believed to provide the strongest link between primate communication and human language.
The lecture will review the concept of functional reference, and conclude that such context-specific calls do not fundamentally differ from less specific primate vocalisations, with all such calls being comparable not to linguistic utterances, but to emotional human vocalisations such as laughter and cries. Dr Wheeler will argue the continued focus on functionally referent communication has become a red herring in the pursuit of the links between primate communication and human language.
For full details of the lecture are available here: www.kent.ac.uk/secl/researchcentres/cll/events
These events are open to all but are of particular interest to students of the Department of English Language & Linguistics.