evolutionary psychology

[awty]

[evolcon]

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

I don't doubt any of that, African grays are known to have remarkable intelligence, I've seen videos of Pepperberg's work. I will have to do some research concerning using English to communicate with other parrots. thanks for the post.

Are you now ready to admit that language is not unique to humans?

Boru

[evolcon]

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

[brewer]

The subject is language. and the complex communications that allow humans to, access, with thought. the information stored in their brain, and to do this at will. Human conversation is a very special ability, one must assemble a large number of words, arrange them in a grammatically correct order and verbalize them rapidly.  The avarage human vocabulary consist of more than 10,000 words.
 Human communications allows us to plan, we can think about and talk about yesterday, or years ago, we can discuss the future, we can do this at our leisure, in a boardroom or backyard bbq,  Our amazing progress from hunter gatherer tribes to today's civilization
is due in no small part due to our language skill.

Yes, yes, we all know that you think language is the best thing ever and the only thing you can talk about.

But it might be the time for you to SHUT UP!

[evolcon]

[awty]

Okay then. We can call this topic closed. You win.

[brewer]

lan•guage

[Angrboda]

Rereading what Britannica wrote about Alex makes me realize something. I had thought that training primates to use language didn't really address their native capacity for language, but in hindsight I think that is wrong. Humans do not learn language without exposure and encouragement, so it would be a bit of a double standard to expect primates to learn language without those things. In that, I'm reminded of Chomsky's view that humans must come "language ready" in some sense, or else they could not realistically translate their experience of language from others into a comprehensible thing that they can use and understand. The search space of language is just too vast. And if that is the case, that primates and other animals exposed to language pick up skills in use and comprehension, then they must have in some sense been "language ready." This strongly suggests that there is good reason to believe that the continuity hypothesis, that language comprehension forms a continuum in the animal kingdom rather than an abrupt transition to humans, is likely correct. Those arguing otherwise seem to be relying on incidental facts such as differences in form between different animal's communication or the fact that an animal by design has preferred means of communication and preferred uses of communication that don't mirror those of humans. This all seems like a pathetic tempest in a teapot given the similarities between and apparently rich cognitive resources that animals besides humans possess in the domain of communication.