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The Difference between Animal & Human Communication by Johnson M Jose …
The Difference between Animal & Human Communication by Johnson M Jose
Duality
Distinctive sounds, called phonemes, are arbitrary & have no meaning. But humans can string these sounds in an infinite number of ways to create meaning via words and sentences.
Animals do not communicate by arranging arbitrary sounds, which limits the number of messages they can create.
Creativity
Humans use their linguistic resources to produce new expressions and sentences.
Animal communication is a closed system. It cannot produce new signals to communicate novel events or experiences.
Displacement
Humans can talk about remote, abstract or imaginary things that aren't happening in their immediate environments.
Animal communication is mostly context bound. They communicate in reaction to a stimulus in the immediate environment such as food or danger.
Interchangeability
Any gender of human can use the same languages.
Certain animal communications in the animal word can only be used by one gender of that animal (eg : Bee dancing is only performed by worker bees, which are female.
Cultural Transmission
Human language is culturally transmitted. Human beings brought up in different cultures acquire different languages. One can also learn other languages via the influence of other cultures.
Animals communication ability is transmitted biologically, thus they are unable to learn other languages.
Arbitrariness
Human language is symbolic, using a set of number of sounds (phonemes) & characters (alphabets) which allows ideas to be recorded & preserved.
Animal communication is not symbolic, so it cannot preserve ideas of the past.
Biology
Human vocal cords can produce a large number of sounds. Each human language uses a number of those sounds.
Every animal has different biological structures, which impact the way they make sounds.