Whale learns same language as dolphins, research finds

After two months the beluga whale learned to speak to its dolphin neighbours

A whale that was living close to a pod of bottlenose dolphins has learnt to speak their language, according to new research. 

Two months after the beluga whale was introduced into a new facility with the dolphins, scientists found that it began to imitate their whistles.

The four-year-old whale was moved in 2013 to live in the Koktebel dolphinarium in Crimea, with details of the discovery reported in science journal Animal Cognition.

And as the whale learned to communicate in the dolphins’ language, scientists found that the whale began losing its own.

“Two months after the beluga’s introduction into a new facility, we found that it began to imitate whistles of the dolphins, whereas one type of its own calls seemed to disappear,” said researcher Elena Panaova, of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow.

She added: "While the imitations of dolphin whistles were regularly detected among the beluga's vocalisations, we found only one case in which the dolphins produced short calls that resembled those of the beluga.”

Continued  

The Original Human Language Like Yoda Sounded

Many linguists believe all human languages derived from a single tongue spoken in East Africa around 50,000 years ago. They've found clues scattered throughout the vocabularies and grammars of the world as to how that original "proto-human language" might have sounded. New research suggests that it sounded somewhat like the speech of Yoda, the tiny green Jedi from "Star Wars."

There are various word orders used in the languages of the world. Some, like English, use subject-verb-object (SVO) ordering, as in the sentence "I like you." Others, such as Latin, use subject-object-verb (SOV) ordering, as in "I you like." In rare cases, OSV, OVS, VOS and VSO are used. In a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Merritt Ruhlen and Murray Gell-Mann, co-directors of the Santa Fe Institute Program on the Evolution of Human Languages, argue that the original language used SOV ordering ("I you like").

"This language would have been spoken by a small East African population who seemingly invented fully modern language and then spread around the world, replacing everyone else," Ruhlen told Life's Little Mysteries, a sister site to LiveScience.

The researchers came to their conclusion after creating a language family tree, which shows the historical relationships between all the languages of the world. For example, all the Romance languages (Italian, Rumanian, French, Spanish) derive from Latin, which was spoken in Rome 2,000 years ago; that Latin family is itself a branch of an even larger tree, whose other branches include Germanic, Slavic, Greek, Indic and others. Together, all those languages make up the Indo-European language family, which fits like a puzzle piece with all the other language families in the world. [What's the Hardest Language to Learn?]

"These families — all families — are identified by finding words in a set of languages that are similar to each other but not found elsewhere," Ruhlen explained in an email.

In the language family tree, Ruhlen and Gell-Mann discovered a distinct pattern in how word orders change as languages branch off from their mother tongues. "What we found was that the distribution of the six possible word orders did not vary randomly. … Rather, the distribution of these six types was highly structured, and the paths of linguistic change in word order were clear," Ruhlen said.
Out of the 2,000 modern languages that fit in the family tree, the researchers found that more than half are SOV languages. The ones that are SVO, OVS and OSV all derive directly from SOV languages — never the other way around. For example, French, which is SVO, derives from Latin, which is SOV.
Furthermore, languages that are VSO and VOS always derive from SVO languages. Thus, all languages descend from an original SOV word order – "which leads to the conclusion that the word order in the language from which all modern languages derive must have been SOV," Ruhlen wrote.
Was it just an accident that the mother of all mother tongues was probably SOV, rather than one of the other five possibilities? The researchers think not. Predating Ruhlen's and Gell-Mann's work, Tom Givon, a linguist at the University of Oregon, argued that SOV had to have been the first word order, based on how children learn language. He found that the SOV word ordering seems to come most naturally to humans. [Why Are 'Mama' and 'Dada' a Baby's First Words?]

And if that's the case, it seems strange that languages switch word orders as they evolve. Indeed, no one really knows why word orders would switch. "We have found that word changes in very precise ways," Ruhlen said. "But the fact remains that half of the world's languages still have SOV word order because, in Murray's and my opinion, they have not changed word order at all. [Our data] shows how word order changes … but it is unpredictable if word order will change, and I really don't know why."

http://www.livescience.com/16541-original-human-language-yoda-sounded.html

Township mob burns 'talking' monkey as witch

Children traumatised as animal welfare group blames 'dreadful superstition' fuelled by ignorance

David Smith in Johannesburg
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 31 May 2011 14.07 BST

A monkey was pelted with stones, shot at and burned to death in a South African township because residents believed it was linked to witchcraft, an animal welfare agency has said.

A mob chanted "Kill that witch!" as the vervet monkey was put in a bucket, doused with petrol and set on fire, according to witnesses. Children who witnessed the killing last week were said to be traumatised.

One resident, Tebogo Moswetsi, admitted he had captured the monkey as it sought refuge up a tree in Kagiso, west of Johannesburg.

"I was curious to see this monkey that people claimed could talk, and when I saw a group of people chasing after it, I joined them," he told South Africa's Star newspaper. "When it went up the tree, I climbed after it and brought it down because I was curious as I found it unbelievable that a monkey could talk.

"I feel guilty. I shouldn't have taken it down from that tree. I dropped it down after someone poured petrol on it. I had no choice."

Moswetsi added: "Someone struck a match. [The monkey] got out of the bucket and dropped down dead. They continued throwing stones at it."

Cora Bailey, manager of Community Led Animal Welfare (Claw) in South Africa, was alerted by a local resident and arrived at a scene of "sheer criminality".

She said: "We just got there too late. What was incredibly sad is that there were so many little children in the crowd – some of them very traumatised.

"There were youngsters literally laughing in my face. But there were older people who were devastated by it. Everyone was saying sorry. While I was talking, the monkey was burning behind me."

Bailey said there is a "dreadful superstition" about monkeys and witchcraft in some communities, fuelled by ignorance that the animals can become separated from their troops or displaced from their natural habitats.

"We deal with this kind of situation on a very regular basis. We usually manage to do crowd control so the monkey doesn't come to any harm."

Bailey said she was horrified by racist comments that have appeared online in reaction to the incident. "Every time this happens, it's people in the community who call us. Cruelty to animals is not a racial thing. I've worked in townships for 20 years and there are good and bad people in all communities."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/31/mob-burns-monkey-as-witch

Nazis tried to build army of talking dogs to help win World War Two

Dr Jan Bondeson's dog research has revealed Nazi canine to human telepathy experiments (Pic: BNPS)

The Nazis attempted to build an army of dogs that could read, talk and spell, research by Cardiff University lecturer Dr Jan Bondeson has revealed.

Daniella Graham - 24th May, 2011

Adolf Hitler apparently felt man's best friend could be the Allies' worst enemy with a little bit of help, so a special 'dog school' was set up by the Germans where gifted mutts could hone their talents.

The Nazi canine recruits were trained to speak and tap out signals using their paws, with one reportedly able to say 'Mein Fuhrer' when asked to identify the Nazi dictator himself.

The Daily Telegraph reports that the school, named the Tier-Sprechschule, was set up in the 1930s and ran throughout the war period.

And while the dogs were intended to help officers in concentration camps, one plucky canine decided he had other priorities – barking the German for 'Hungry! Give me cakes.'

Dr Bondeson uncovered the extraordinary story while researching for his latest book, Amazing Dogs: A Cabinet of Canine Curiosities.

http://www.metro.co.uk/weird/864232-nazis-tried-to-build-army-of-talking-dogs-to-help-win-world-war-two

Dolphin species attempt 'common language'

Thursday, 30 September 2010
By Matt Walker
Editor, Earth News

When two dolphin species come together, they attempt to find a common language, preliminary research suggests.

Bottlenose and Guyana dolphins, two distantly related species, often come together to socialise in waters off the coast of Costa Rica.

Both species make unique sounds, but when they gather, they change the way they communicate, and begin using an intermediate language.

That raises the possibility the two species are communicating in some way.

Details are published in the journal Ethology.

It is not yet clear exactly what is taking place between the two dolphin species, but it is the first evidence that the animals modify their communications in the presence of other species, not just other dolphins of their own kind.

Biologist Dr Laura May-Collado of the University of Puerto Rico in San Juan made the discovery studying dolphins swimming in the Gandoca-Manzanillo Wildlife Refuge of the southern Caribbean coast of Costa Rica.

Bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) are larger, measuring up to 3.8m long, with a long dorsal fin.

Guyana dolphins (Sotalia guianensis) are much smaller, measuring 2.1m long, and have a smaller dorsal fin and longer snout, known as a rostrum.

Both species swim in groups made up of their own kind.

When bottlenose dolphins swim together, they emit longer, lower frequency calls, that are modulated.

In contrast, Guyana dolphins usually communicate using higher frequency whistles that have their own particular structure.

But often, the two species swim together in one group. These interactions are usually antagonistic, as the larger bottlenose dolphins harass the smaller Guyana dolphins.

When the two dolphins gather, they produce quite different calls, Dr May-Collado has discovered.

Crucially, calls emitted during these multi-species encounters are of an intermediate frequency and duration.

In other words, the dolphins start communicating in a style that is somewhere between those of the two separate species.

"I was surprised by these findings, as I was expecting both species to emphasise, perhaps exaggerate, their species-specific signals," Dr May-Collado told the BBC.

"Instead the signals recorded during these encounters became more homogenous.

"This was a very exciting discovery."

As yet, Dr May-Collado cannot be sure if both species are changing the way they communicate, or whether it is one species attempting to call more like the other.

That is because her sound equipment could only record the total calls produced by mixed species groups of dolphins, and could not separate out sounds made by individuals.

"This limits how much I can say about how much they are communicating," says Dr May-Collado.

However, dolphins are known to have an extraordinary ability to change their calls when 'talking' to other individuals, or to ensure they are heard over the din of background noise pollution.

So "I wouldn't be surprised that they can modify their signals to mimic, and even possibly communicate with other species. Particularly when their home ranges force them to interact on a daily basis, which is the case of this study," she says.

It is also unclear whether the two species are simply learning to communicate using a common language, or whether the Guyana dolphins alone are making the new sounds due to stress.

It could even be that the Guyana dolphins are attempting "to emit threatening sounds in the language of the intruder", in a bid to make the bottlenose dolphins desist, Dr May-Collado says.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_9045000/9045389.stm
(Submitted by Chad Arment)

Orangutans use mime to communicate messages

August 13, 2010 12:00 PM

Scientists who analysed video footage of orangutans amassed over 20 years, claim the creatures are able to explain things to each other, and humans, via mime.

The boffins say they found 18 occasions in which orangutans used "elaborated gestures of pantomime" to get what they wanted.

Examples ranged from rubbing a leaf on their forehead and then passing it to a human as an instruction to clean them, to holding an object over their head because the want an umbrella passing to them.

Professor Anne Russon said the finding could offer new insight into the evolutionary origins of human language.

Which is all well and good… but what we want to know is when will the world's first inter-species charades tournament take place.

Russon - of York University in Toronto - added that if the mime is not understood by a human the orangutans get a look on their faces as if to say ‘Are you stupid?

http://newslite.tv/2010/08/13/orangutans-use-mime-to-communi.html

Elephants Emit Special "Bee Rumble" to Warn Others About Marauding Bugs

Posted: 27 Apr 2010 11:24 AM PDT

When it comes to the relationship between bees and African elephants, size does not matter. The massive pachyderms are terrified of bees, which can painfully sting elephants around their eyes and inside their trunks. Baby elephants are the most vulnerable to bee stings, as their skin isn't thick enough to ward off the insects. And researchers have now found that the elephants have developed a special strategy to help them avoid these bees that scare the bejesus out of them.

When an elephant takes note of a swarm of bees, it emits a distinct rumbling call. This bee alarm, which the scientists termed a "bee rumble," helps draw the herd's attention to the bees and allows them to run off unharmed, the researchers write in the journal PloS ONE. What's more, they respond to an audio recording of the bee rumble as if it were the real thing, giving farmers a tool they could potentially use to fend off unwanted elephants.

This is the first time that an alarm call for a specific threat has been identified in elephants. Lead researcher Lucy King of the University of Oxford believes that such calls may be an "emotional response" to a threat and a way to co-ordinate group movements. Ms King explained: "We discovered elephants not only flee from the buzzing sound, but make a unique rumbling call, as well as shaking their heads" [BBC]. The head-shaking looked like an attempt to fend off or dislodge the bees that the elephants assumed were buzzing around, King says.

For the study, King and her team played the recordings of the bee rumble vocalization to 10 elephant families. Six of the families immediately got up and fled, despite the fact that they had neither seen nor heard any bees. When the scientists tweaked the vocalization a bit to remove a key acoustical feature found in bee rumbles, the elephants stayed put. The researchers suggest that elephants may also have warning calls to alert their fellows to humans and lions---much like Diana monkeys in West Africa can call out a leopard alarm or eagle alarm, depending on which predator they spot [ScienceNOW].

King hopes that recordings of the bee rumble can be used by farmers to chase away elephants and keep them from trampling fields. As agriculture expands in Africa, elephants have been squeezed into tighter habitats--causing them to stray across fields and damage crops. "Farmers will do anything to keep their crops and families safe from damage, and unfortunately records of shootings, spearings, and poisonings of elephants are on the increase," Ms King wrote on the University of Oxford's website [BBC]. King hopes that playing back the bee rumble around fields could serve as a low-tech, humane deterrent to elephants, who will then be sent packing back into the woods.

(Submitted by T. Peter Park)

Elephant-speak for 'Beware of the bees'

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18821-elephantspeak-for-beware-of-the-bees.html

Elephant-speak for 'Beware of the bees'
• 22:00 26 April 2010 by Andy Coghlan

Video: Elephant warning
Listen: 'Bee rumble' alarm call made by elephants.

Entire elephant families bolt when they hear recordings of trumpetings made by other elephants fleeing from bees.
This is the first demonstration that elephants may make specific sounds to warn of particular threats, although they have also been observed "roaring" when threatened by lions.

"Six out of 10 elephant families fled from the loudspeaker when we played the 'bee rumble' compared to just two when we played a control rumble and one with the same call shifted to a different frequency," says Lucy King of the University of Oxford, who heads a team in Kenya investigating the meanings of elephant vocalisations. The fleeing elephants also shook their heads violently, as if trying to deflect bees.

In 2007, King and her colleagues demonstrated that elephants flee in terror from bees and from recordings of bees. Last year, in follow-up trials, they successfully protected human settlements from encroachment by elephants by wiring beehives together as a fence.

Bee rumble

The latest findings open up the possibility of using recordings of the "bee rumble" as a deterrent as well, helping to prevent potential conflict between humans and elephants.

Elephants are terrified of bees because they can crawl into their trunk and sting them from inside it. They also sting around the animals' eyes, leaving painful welts that take weeks to disappear. The researchers believe that the rumbles alert both the elephant's family and neighbouring herds to the threat, and may teach young elephants that bees are dangerous.

Monkeys and birds are known to produce slightly different sounds to warn of different types of threat. Putty-nosed monkeys native to Nigeria, for example, make different sounds to warn of leopards or eagles.

Journal reference: report to appear in PLoS ONE

Elephant 'secret language' clues

Monday, 22 February 2010
By Pallab Ghosh
Science correspondent, BBC News, San Diego

Researchers at San Diego Zoo have been studying what has been described as the "secret language" of elephants.

They have been monitoring communications between animals that cannot be heard by human ears.

The elephant's trumpeting call will be familiar to most people, but the animals also emit growls.

Their growls, however, are only partly audible; two-thirds of the call is at frequencies that are too low to be picked up by our hearing.

To learn more about the inaudible part of the growl, the team attached a microphone sensitive to these low frequencies and a GPS tracking system to eight of the zoo's female elephants.

The researchers could then correlate the noises the animals were making with what they were doing.

Matt Anderson, who led the project, told BBC News: "We're excited to learn of the hierarchy within the female herd and how they interact and intercede with one another."

Predator warning?

The team has already learned that pregnant females use this low frequency communication to announce to the rest of their herd that they are about to give birth.

"We've seen that after their long gestation of over two years, in the last 12 days we see a manipulation of the low part of the growl, the low part that we can't hear.

"This we believe is to announce to the rest of the herd that the baby is imminent," said Dr Anderson.

The researchers believe that this also warns the elephants to look out for predators.

"You may think that a baby calf of about 300 pounds would not be as open to predation as other species," he says. "But packs of hyenas are a big threat in the wild."

Dr Anderson and his team are continuing to analyse data in order to learn more about this secret elephant language.

See video at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8527009.stm
(Submitted by T Peter Park)

Monkey noises provide clue to understanding the origins of human language

Scientists believe they have taken a step closer to understanding the origins of human language after identifying how monkeys combine sounds to convey meaning.

Published: 10:28AM GMT 11 Dec 2009

A team of Scottish scientists found the Campbell's monkey can add a simple sound to its alarm calls to create new ones and then combine them to convey even more information.

One of the defining features of human language is the process of adding another unit - a prefix or suffix - to a word to change its meaning. For example, adding "hood" to the word "brother" to form "brotherhood".

Another group of scientists team looking at the same species of monkey in the Ivory Coast's Tai National Park made a similar finding.

The researchers studied alpha males in six wild groups. They are alert to potential threats and disturbances and use their calls to highlight them.

The scientists discovered that the monkeys made several distinct alarm cries, among them calls described as "boom", "krak" and "hok".

The team found that booms were sounded when a falling branch had been spotted or to initiate group travel.

Kraks were only given after a leopard had been sighted.

While hoks were almost exclusively sounded when a crowned eagle swooped above the canopy.

But further analysis revealed that while booms were always unaltered, the monkeys sometimes added an "oo" to their kraks and hoks - and this transformed the information they were conveying.

Klaus Zuberbuehler, an author of the paper from the University of St Andrews, Scotland, said: "If you add this subtle additional oo unit to turn krak into krak-oo, then that call can be given to a whole range of other contexts. If you take the suffix away then it is almost exclusively a leopard alarm call."

While krak-oo appeared to be a general alarm call given to almost any disturbance, hok-oo was used for commotion specifically in the canopy, from the presence of neighbouring groups of monkeys to a glimpse of other flying animals.

Professor Zuberbuehler added: "What is interesting is that the same acoustic modifier is being used for these calls and that is really analogous to using a suffix in human language."

A second study focused on how Campbell monkeys combined their alarm calls, as they were more likely to use a longer sequence of calls than voice individual ones.

Professor Zuberbuehler said: "Sometimes the monkey can give 10, 15 or even 20 calls, and typically different types of calls can appear in these sequences... So we tried to understand what particular context would trigger these sequences."

The scientists found that a sequence made up only of booms was used to prompt the group to travel.

If a pair of booms was followed by some krak-oos, it was almost exclusively given when falling trees or branches had been seen.

But if two booms were followed by a mix of krak-oos and hok-oos, then that seemed to signal the presence of a neighbouring group of Campbell's monkeys or another lone male.

Professor Zuberbuehler said: "These are three different events that are nothing to do with each other, but they are basically made of the same call types."

He added: "This is the first time that we can demonstrate that these sequences convey something about the environment or an event the monkey has witnessed."

The researchers say that while the monkey's linguistic talents may be unique amongst primate species, if the findings prove to be more widespread then they could help to reveal more about the origins of language.

Professor Zuberbueler said: "Campbell's monkeys and humans separated from a common ancestor about 30 million years ago.

"This set of papers shows that in terms of the call morphology, there seem to be ancestral traits floating around the primate lineage that haven't been known before."

The research is published in the journals Plos One and PNAS.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/6787224/Monkey-noises-provide-clue-to-understanding-the-origins-of-human-language.html

Right-Handed Chimpanzees Provide Clues to the Origin of Human Language

ScienceDaily (Nov. 16, 2009) — Most of the linguistic functions in humans are controlled by the left cerebral hemisphere. A study of captive chimpanzees at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center (Atlanta, Georgia), reported in the January 2010 issue of Elsevier's Cortex, suggests that this "hemispheric lateralization" for language may have its evolutionary roots in the gestural communication of our common ancestors. A large majority of the chimpanzees in the study showed a significant bias towards right-handed gestures when communicating, which may reflect a similar dominance of the left hemisphere for communication in chimpanzees as that seen for language functions in humans.

A team of researchers, supervised by Prof. William D. Hopkins of Agnes Scott College (Decatur, Georgia), studied hand-use in 70 captive chimpanzees over a period of 10 months, recording a variety of communicative gestures specific to chimpanzees. These included 'arm threat', 'extend arm' or 'hand-slap' gestures produced in different social contexts, such as attention-getting interactions, shared excitation, threat, aggression, greeting, reconciliation or invitations for grooming or for play. The gestures were directed at the human observers, as well as toward other chimpanzees.

"The degree of predominance of the right hand for gestures is one of the most pronounced we have ever found in chimpanzees in comparison to other non-communicative manual actions. We already found such manual biases in this species for pointing gestures exclusively directed to humans. These additional data clearly showed that right-handedness for gestures is not specifically associated to interactions with humans, but generalizes to intraspecific communication," notes Prof. Hopkins.

The French co-authors, Dr. Adrien Meguerditchian and Prof. Jacques Vauclair, from the Aix-Marseille University (Aix-en-Provence, France), also point out that "this finding provides additional support to the idea that speech evolved initially from a gestural communicative system in our ancestors. Moreover, gestural communication in apes shares some key features with human language, such as intentionality, referential properties and flexibility of learning and use".

Journal Reference:

1. Adrien Meguerditchian, Jacques Vauclair and William D. Hopkins. Captive chimpanzees use their right hand to communicate with each other: Implications for the origin of the cerebral substrate for language. Cortex, Volume 46, Issue 1 (January 2010)

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091116103437.htm

(Submitted by T. Peter Park)

Monkeys recognise 'bad grammar'

Studies on monkeys have revealed clues about the evolution of language.

In the journal Biology Letters, researchers said that cotton-top tamarins are able to spot if the order of syllables in a word is "wrong".

They familiarised the monkeys with two-syllable terms, and recorded their reaction to words that were not consistent with that syllable pattern.

The team says the work illustrates how many animals use patterns that have become intrinsic to human language.

And this provides evidence of the "non-lingual" origin of certain aspects of language, the group told BBC News.

In the experiment, the monkeys were played a series of different words that all shared either the same first syllable or second syllable.

The idea was to investigate the origins of the prefixes and affixes used in many languages to indicate tense.

In English, for example, the past tense of a verb can be composed using the suffix "-ed" - "walk" becomes "walked".

Listening test
The monkeys were not trained to respond to specific words, but they were familiarised with a pattern - a particular prefix, or a suffix.

"In the prefixation condition, they heard 'shoy-bi', 'shoy-la', 'shoy-ro' and so on," explained Ansgar Endress, lead author of the study.

"The idea is that they get used to the pattern if you play it long enough."

The "suffixation" group heard words with a changing first syllable, this time with the suffix, "shoy", kept consistent - such as "bi-shoy" and "la-shoy".

The team played recordings of these "familiarisation" words to the animals for half an hour.
The following day, the monkeys were tested.

The researchers played them "new" words that were either consistent with the pattern they had heard before - with "shoy" in the right place - or inconsistent with the familiar pattern.

"We simply measured how often the monkeys looked to the speaker when we played the items," said Dr Endress.

"If they got used to, or bored by, the pattern, then they might be more interested in items that violate (it) - because they are something new - than in items that are consistent with the pattern."

Marc Hauser, who was also involved in this study, told BBC News that the results showed how human language had incorporated memory processes that were not "language-specific".

"Simple temporal ordering is shared with non-human animals," he said.

"This has an important role. In bird song or whale song, for example, there's a temporal ordering to the notes and that's critical for communication."

And it goes beyond that. "In primates, this ordering is vital for learning," explained Professor Hauser. "In tool use, primates learn from each other that you do this first, then you do that, then it's that."

Professor Hauser described how evident this innate ability is when a child learns language.
"As a child learns to use the past tense," he said, "they may generalise and use a suffix wrongly, but they will never generalise in the wrong direction.

"You never hear them say ed-walk instead of walked."


By Victoria Gill Science reporter, BBC News


http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8139322.stm