Is language unique to humans?

Re:Is language unique to humans? by yread on Friday October 26, 2012 @07:27AM (#4701730)

Like sentences, the catalogue of human actions is infinite. We stretch, bend, and kick. We build bridges and prepare meals. We perform an endless variety of dance routines. We make paper airplanes. A complex action, like hammering a nail, can be broken down into its constituent actions – grasping, striking, reaching – just as a sentence can be broken into its units – nouns, verbs, adjectives. In 1951, cognitive psychologist Karl Lashley proposed a link between language and action. "Not only speech,” he wrote, “but all skilled acts seem to involve the same problems of serial ordering, even down to the temporal coordination of muscular contractions in such a movement as reaching and grasping." Just as a stream of speech does not contain explicit pauses between words, fluid actions like nail hammering do not contain breaks between their components. Yet humans effortlessly parse speech streams and action sequences into their parts.

I've found this part most interesting. I wonder if it's just the general pattern matching at work or something more.

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Re:Is language unique to humans? by jonsen on Friday October 26, 2012 @08:58AM (#4701936)

You can read an interesting argument for that in On Intelligence:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Intelligence

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Re:Is language unique to humans? by mtrimpe on Friday October 26, 2012 @07:53AM (#4701787)

I can't find the reference anymore, but there is a body of research which takes human motion and extracts a language from it including grammar, dialog acts, words, phonemes.

The possibilities of the video/body movement equivalent of speech recognition would open up a massive, incredibly interesting new dataset to wrangle.

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