Animal language – The daily blog of behavioral and cognitive economics

Animals Can’t Talk Like Humans. Here’s Why The Hunt For Their Languages Has Left Us Empty-Handed

Humans have a unique “sequence hypothesis” ability – We can recognize and remember the exact sequential order of words and events, while other animals (including our closest relatives like bonobos) can only represent order approximately. True compositionality requires productive creativity – While animals can combine calls or gestures, they don’t create new meanings in an open-ended way like humans do when we effortlessly generate novel word combinations and understand new expressions. Surface similarities don’t mean same mechanisms – Animal behaviors that appear language-like may actually be explained by simpler learning mechanisms rather than true compositional meaning, despite decades of research trying to find human-like language in other species. ….[READ]