Animal Communication and Phonetics Lecture Notes

Flashcards covering animal communication systems (Nim, Kanzi, Rico, Chaser), properties of human language, and the fundamentals of phonetics and phonology.

Nim (Chimpsky)

A chimpanzee ($1973$–$2000$) researched by Herbert Terrace who communicated using ASL, reaching feats of thousands of $2$-sign combinations and some $4$- and $5$-sign combinations.

Herbert Terrace

The lead researcher who studied Nim (Chimpsky) and questioned whether chimpanzee signing truly resembles human language.

Kanzi

A bonobo ($1980$–$2025$) researched by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and Duane Savage-Rumbaugh who mastered $200+$ lexigrams on a communication board without explicit instruction.

Rico

A border collie who demonstrated impressive word learning by mastering more than $200$ words.

Chaser

A border collie who mastered more than $1,000$ words and was able to "fast-map" new words.

Displaced referentiality

A key property of human language that allows speakers to refer to things or events not present in the immediate time or space.

Abstract referentiality

The ability of human communication to refer to non-concrete ideas, which distinguishes it from most animal communication systems.

Phonetics

The study of the acoustic, articulatory, and auditory properties of human language, dealing with objective physical aspects of speech.

Phonology

The study of the patterns of meaningful sounds, known as phonemes, within a specific language.

Phonemes

A small inventory of meaningful sound contrasts selected by a language from a potential range of over $3000+$ possible sounds.

Consonants

Speech sounds produced by blocking or restricting airflow, categorized by their place and manner of articulation.

Vowels

Speech sounds formed by vibrating the vocal chords as air rushes through the mouth, differing by tongue height and position.

Velum

The soft palate, which is involved in determining the place of articulation for sounds like "velars".

Voicing

The physical process of vibrating the vocal chords during the production of a speech sound.

Aspiration

A small puff of air accompanying the production of a sound, such as the difference between the sounds in "pill" and "spill".

Rotokas

A language from Papua New Guinea known for having a very small phoneme inventory of only $11$ sounds.

Taa

A language from Botswana characterized by a very large phoneme inventory of over $100+$ sounds.

McGurk Effect

A phenomenon demonstrating that speech perception is shaped by multimodal context, such as visual information, and not just the sound signal.

Arbitrariness of the sign

The linguistic concept, attributed to Hockett ($1960$), that there is no inherent relationship between the sound of a word and its meaning.

Ideophones

Words that evoke sensory imagery through sound, such as the Japanese term "pikapika" for "bright"; Japanese has approximately $4500$ of these.

Phonaesthemes

Groups of words with similar forms and similar meanings, such as the "sn-" cluster in English (e.g., snout, sniff, sneeze).

Onomatopoeia

Words that imitate sounds in a language-specific way, such as "oink" (English), "grunz" (German), or "buu" (Japanese) for a pig.

Labiodental sounds

Sounds like "f" and "v" that became more common in human languages alongside the prevalence of overbites, roughly $3.6\,\text{kya}$.

Plosives

A manner of articulation involving a complete closure of the airflow at the place of articulation (e.g., pin, bin, Tim).

Fricatives

A manner of articulation involving constricted airflow that creates friction (e.g., file, vile, sip, zip).

Affricates

A manner of articulation where the airflow is first blocked and then constricted, such as in "jump" or "chump".

Rivas (2005)

A researcher who argued that most communicative intentions in chimps are for requesting and that meaningful combinations are rare compared to uninterpretable ones like "CHASE TOOTHBRUSH".

Nasal sound

A manner of articulation where air is allowed to rush through the nose, exemplified by words like "Mom" or "long".