Human Language and Animal Communication

Human and animal communication system

Before we look at the different human and animal communication systems in detail, let's start by defining what we mean by communication.

Human and animal communication definition

What qualifies as communication? Communication refers to an action that aims to transmit information from one to others, either verbally or through non-verbal signals. Humans rely mostly on language to communicate, which sets us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. While other animals can also communicate through vocalisations, human language is unique in terms of its capability to use organised language to express complex ideas.

A key aspect of human communication is language...

So, according to this definition, can different ways that animals communicate be called languages? Not exactly. Animal communication usually involves signals. Whether it's an excretion of scents, pheromones, a vocalisation or a movement, these signals lack the essential features of a language. Although, some animals do communicate through means of sounds.

Characteristics of human language and animal communication

Now, let's look at the key characteristics of human language and animal communication.

Characteristics of animal communication

Animals use communication to influence the actions of other individuals or encourage co-operation. Their communication is limited to signals and mostly serves a few purposes.

Based on these purposes, we can distinguish the four types of animal communication: communication for survival, reproduction, gaining or maintaining territory and obtaining food.

• To increase the herd's survival and communicate about a predator's presence, impales use vocalisation. They can also use their body language to warn others about the threat by freezing.

• For reproduction, the male peacock will display his colourful tail of feathers and entice the female by wiggling the feathers around. This way, peacocks signal their genetic fitness to potential mating partners.

• Have you ever spotted a cat rubbing its cheeks on objects and walls? It's the cats' way of marking their territory. This way, cats deposit their pheromones in a way that other cats will be able to recognise.

• Pets like cats and dogs can also try to get your attention and use vocalisations when they want to be fed. In the wild, animals also communicate with signals to obtain food. For example, bees use food calls to communicate the location of a food source.

Karl Von Frisch’s Bee Study (1950)

Karl Von Frisch is a German-Austrian researcher awarded a Nobel Prize for his fascinating findings about the communicative behaviour of honey bees. He demonstrated that bees have colour vision. As he continued his research on perceptions of the bee, he also found that bees have a strong sense of orientation and direction. This allows them to localise and communicate about food sources even kilometres away from the hive.

The Karl Von Frisch (1950) study aimed to investigate the systems that bees use to communicate about the location of food with the colony. To observe the behaviour of honey bees, he placed bees in a hive with glass windows and dishes containing sugar syrup in different locations. As the bees visited the feeding sites, they were marked with coloured dots to distinguish which site they were coming back from.

Von Frisch found that bees performed elaborate dances, which appeared to communicate to other bees where they found the food. The pace at which they waggled indicated how far away was the food, and the angle at which they performed these movements in relation to a vertical line indicated the direction of the food source.

These findings led Von Frisch to conclude that bees use a set of movements to communicate the exact location of a food source to other colony members.

Honey bee waggle dance, commons.wikimedia.org; source Own work; license for free use under the Creative CommonsAttribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license.

Characteristics of human language

Even though we use language in everyday life, we often don't think about how complex it is. Language is universal across cultures and unique to our species. The languages spoken across the globe differ, but interestingly, these languages share similar characteristics. Charles Hockett, in 1960, identified up to 16 features of language, some of which are shared and some that differ from human language to primitive communication.

The list of characteristics was later developed further by Jean Aitchison (1983). Aitchison argued that there are 11 essential characteristics of language. She considered four of these criteria as particularly unique to human language.

The first criterion is displacement, which refers to the human ability to exchange information about abstract, hypothetical and distant ideas. Animal communication is limited to mostly current or near past events.

Another key characteristic is structure dependence. Human language, such as conversations or the sentences that we construct, all follow rules. The rules organise information so that others can understand what we are trying to say. While the rules of grammar are different depending on the language spoken, each has the requirement of grammatical sense.

In contrast, animals don't organise different communicative elements in a structured manner and tend to communicate using simple signals.

Characteristics of human language, freepik.com

The second criterion is semanticity. Human language uses abstract symbols and sounds that don't have any meaning in itself to communicate meaningful messages.

Animals have a set of ways to signal messages like “Danger!”, “Food!”, “I am stronger!” or “I have superior genes!”. However, their signals lack the semanticity we see in human language, which has a word for almost an infinite number of concrete things and abstract or hypothetical ideas.

Creativity is another important criterion of human language. Due to the large number of words and the way they can be organised to communicate meaning, we can create an infinite number of sentences to express what we wish to say. This unlimited capacity differs from animals' limited capacity, such as the release of a specific hormone to convey a message.

Each of the sentences above is different, and yet they basically communicate the same message. The content of a sentence allows us to add endless detail and increase the complexity of our expression.

Human and animal communication similarities

The remaining seven of the 11 characteristics of language identified by Aitchison are common for both human and animal communication. However, it is important to note that while all these features are present in human communication, certain species of animals tend only to possess one or a few of these characteristics.

Let's take a look at these characteristics!

• The use of the vocal-auditory channel - both animals and humans- uses sounds, gestures, and body language to communicate.
• Arbitrariness - the human language uses arbitrary written symbols and arbitrary sounds to convey meaning. Similarly, animals often use arbitrary movements (e.g. the honey bee waggle dance) or vocal signals to communicate.
• Language is learned - humans learn language via cultural transmission. This mechanism is not present in all animals, as some animals appear to have an innate ability to use signals like vocalisations. However, some animals do learn how to communicate from others.
• Spontaneous use of language - Humans have an inner need for this, and we don't need to be encouraged or coerced to talk. This feature is also present in animals.
• Turn-taking - when we communicate with others, we tend to take turns talking or writing; birds also engage in this.
• Duality - refers to the fact that single units don't make sense on their own; they need to be structured to be meaningful. Duality is prevalent in humans and bees. The single movement of a bee does not have communicative value, but when organised in a repeatedly performed dance, it becomes meaningful.
• Ability to read intentions - The last feature is the ability to read intentions. For a message to be conveyed and understood, the individual receiving the message needs to be somewhat aware of what the sender of the message aims to communicate. Humans are very skilled at understanding others' emotional states, intentions, beliefs, and perspectives of others without much effort. Whether animals have these abilities is widely debated.

Human and animal communication differences

So, in a nutshell, what makes the behaviours that animals use to communicate different to how we communicate? One major difference is that humans rely mostly on verbal communication, while animals use mainly movements, vocalisations and scents to communicate. Even though we also use body language and gestures, most of our communication involves language.

Animal communication is also limited both in terms of the complexity of expressions and the content that can be expressed. Animals communicate about events happening now or close in time, mostly for survival purposes. In contrast, the human language gives us infinite ways to talk about an infinite number of things. We can talk about events far into the future, hypothetical situations, as well as our subjective reality and internal states.

Human language is also creative and organised. We have a way of expressing almost every aspect of our experience, which is not so evident in animal communication. There is only so much detail that a honey bee can communicate to help others localise food. They don't have movements that indicate altitude or objects that others will pass on their way to the food source, like mountains or flowers.