ArticlePsychonomic bulletin & review2017
Assessing the uniqueness of language: Animal grammatical abilities take center stage.
Article in Psychonomic bulletin & review, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed.
- ManyBabies 3: A Multi-Lab Study of Infant Algebraic Rule Learning.Developmental science · 2026Article
- A framework for the emergence and analysis of language in social learning agents.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Sequence representation as an early step in the evolution of language.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- Overt and implicit prosody contribute to neurophysiological responses previously attributed to grammatical processing.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Long-distance dependencies in birdsong syntax.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Voice modulatory cues to structure across languages and species.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
- Revisiting Fitch and Hauser's Observation That Tamarin Monkeys Can Learn Combinations Based on Finite-State Grammar.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- Neuronal Encoding in a High-Level Auditory Area: From Sequential Order of Elements to Grammatical Structure.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2019Article
- Constraints on the lexicons of human languages have cognitive roots present in baboons (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2019Article
- Production of Supra-regular Spatial Sequences by Macaque Monkeys.Current biology : CB · 2018Article
- Empirical approaches to the study of language evolution.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2017Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Questions related to the uniqueness of language can only be addressed properly by referring to sound knowledge of the relevant cognitive abilities of nonhuman animals. A key question concerns the nature and extent of animal rule-learning abilities. I discuss two approaches used to assess these abilities. One is comparing the structures of animal vocalizations to linguistic ones, and another is addressing the grammatical rule- and pattern-learning abilities of animals through experiments using artificial grammars. Neither of these approaches has so far provided unambiguous evidence of advanced animal abilities. However, when we consider how animal vocalizations are analyzed, the types of stimuli and tasks that are used in artificial grammar learning experiments, the limited number of species examined, and the groups to which these belong, I argue that the currently available evidence is insufficient to arrive at firm conclusions concerning the limitations of animal grammatical abilities. As a consequence, the gap between human linguistic rule-learning abilities and those of nonhuman animals may be smaller and less clear than is currently assumed. This means that it is still an open question whether a difference in the rule-learning and rule abstraction abilities between animals and humans played the key role in the evolution of language.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.