Baby chicks pass the bouba-kiki test, challenging a theory of language evolution | Hacker News Reader

Baby chicks pass the bouba-kiki test, challenging a theory of language evolution

scientificamerican.com

89 pointsbeardyw38 comments

Front page two days ago, 62 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47105198

Maybe it goes to show that animals just have some of the same brain structures associated with language that we do. Parrots are capable of rather sophisticated language use, and the informal word-button experiments suggest that non-avian animals like cats and dogs display some linguistic ability. So the bouba-kiki effect in animals shouldn't be terribly surprising. Certain mammals and birds perhaps may best be thought of as prelinguistic.

> the informal word-button experiments suggest that non-avian animals like cats and dogs

I always wanted to see long form content on this. Like I'm sure the cherrypicked clips make it look more impressive than reality but I've owned enough pets to believe they can understand more than just individual words / tone.

Here is a video that I actually just watched recently on that exact thing.

https://youtu.be/jfLAaGtNc7U

I get:

The uploader has not made this video available in your country

:( didn’t know that this was a thing

Neither did I, feel free to email me or message me on discord and I can try to download the video and send it to you.

It's your lucky day

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXJfK1wR_w0

Buddhism, Out-of-Africa, Talking Dogs | Robert Sapolsky Father-Offspring Interviews #96

Research implies that - no, pets don't have complex understanding of word combinations, beyond the usual commands. But, in terms of recognizing words individually - some of the gifted ones show abilities on par with 18-month-old humans.

I don't really see how it challenges any theory of language evolution. The bouba kiki effect is hardly necessary nor important for having language.

This is downvoted, perhaps as a 'lazy dismissal'? But I read the SciAm article and I don't think it actually explained this point.

The finding seems to be that the bouba-kiki effect is not specific to humans and does not depend on experience. And the previously-existing theory is presented like so:

> scientists have considered [the bouba-kiki effect] a clue to the origin of language, theorizing that maybe our ancestors built their first words upon these instinctive associations between sound and meaning.

The finding is supposed to undermine, or at least challenge, the theory. But why? Is the point just that, if other species also have the bouba-kiki effect but do not have language, the bouba-kiki effect probably doesn't play as important a role as we thought? That seems to be the implication (though the innate/learned distinction also seems to be relevant, and I'm not sure why that is) -- but surely the bouba-kiki effect was never believed to be anything like a sufficient condition for the development of language, was it?

The word "challenge" in the article title is clickbait. I guess the assumption challenged is that this measurable effect is for humans only because we are so special? Good as a headline for a non-science audience that mostly doesn't believe in evolution. It's pretty obvious that our auditory and visual systems are older than humanity as a species. I'd be surprised if the results were anything but confirming. Chickens are not going to learn English. Other species use sound to communicate and that this effect is measurable is pretty cool.

But no serious linguist thinks that kiki-bouba is that important to language. It's a theory that mistakenly thinks that hard problem in language is coming up with words for objects instead of the actually hard problem of combining words in a systematic way.

> But no serious linguist thinks that kiki-bouba is that important to language.

Do you have a source on that? Because I would expect anyone studying sound symbolism to find the bouba-kiki effect extremely important which is probably why it's such a widely cited study, also inside linguistics.

It's hard to find a source for that kind of negative statement.

Kiki-bouba is important for sound-symbolism definitely! But sound-symbolism is marginal when it comes to language. Iconicity and similar things are very interesting phenomena but they're not the difficult part of language at all and they're not necessary parts of language.

I obviously don't know your background but out of the linguists that I know and have met while doing my degrees in linguistics, I don't know of anyone who would say that the kiki-bouba effect is not important — anything, in fact, that challenges the notion that sound-meaning relations are completely arbitrary is interesting because it might give us clues about the origins of language, not to mention that it lends support to other, related hypotheses about sound-symbolism.

I'm not sure what you mean by "not necessary parts of language", but I would love to hear what you think the necessary parts of language are. Not to mention, what is "the difficult part of language" then?

The Bouba kiki effect doesn't challenge the arbitrariness of the sign because arbitrary doesn't mean uniformly distributed. The effect shows that there's a preference between the two but it doesn't contradict the fact that either could be a perfectly fine label.

The difficult part of language is the fact we can build entirely novel meanings out of a relatively small finite set of words. Bouba kiki has no bearing on the way words are composed.

> The difficult part of language is the fact we can build entirely novel meanings out of a relatively small finite set of words.

So are you saying that we've got e.g. neurolinguistics, psycholinguistics, language acquisition and typology down? Or do you simply mean "interesting to you" when you say "difficult"? Because in my experience, pretty much every subject in linguistics (and most other sciences) is easy if you don't understand it and surprisingly difficult once you start to get a grasp of it.

> Bouba kiki has no bearing on the way words are composed.

It literally shows a preference best described by sound-symbolism so it most certainly has a bearing on how words are composed. Just because the relation between sound and meaning _can_ be arbitrary, showing that in some cases it's not entirely so is extremely valuable for evolutionary linguistics.

> a non-science audience that mostly doesn't believe in evolution

This isn't true anywhere in the world except Turkey. Even the second least "evolution believing" country in the world, USA, has 54% of the general public accepting evolution and only 31% believing in creationism, as of 2009.

The mainline opposing view to evolution seems to be that one guy made all living beings over the course of a week. Common brain structures should be even less surprising in that scenario. That'd just be God taking what works and reusing it, either refining it for a more intelligent species or removing parts that are not needed but leaving some of the supporting infrastructure around

After all, lazy engineers are made in God's image /s

Yeah I'm not sure why it's being downvoted, I don't dismiss the study at all (I'm the one who originally posted it!). I just think the scientific reporting on it is very odd. It's an interesting study in terms of what it has to say about innate vs learnt associations.

>scientists have considered [the bouba-kiki effect] a clue to the origin of language, theorizing that maybe our ancestors built their first words upon these instinctive associations between sound and meaning.

I suppose just working in linguistics, I find this such a fringe and unserious theory. The hard part of language isn't associating sounds with objects (dogs can do that), it's putting those words together to make novel meanings.

I fonud the following Wikipedia section somewhat useful for understanding the context here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect#Implications...

Annoyingly, very few of the citations are accessible. But the gist as I understand it is that this challenges various proposed explanations for the Bouba-Kiki effect, for example that it relates to human physiology or has a human-specific neurological basis.

So, the next version of Jurassic Park will have a talking velociraptor ?

(More honest question: is there enough info in the skeletons / fossils that we have to exclude the possiblity that birds ancestors could modulate sound enough to have "something" like a language, which would have been "lost" after extinction events ?)

This is already sort of in Jurassic Park 3, which features a 3D-printed velociraptor larynx that can be blown into to reproduce vocalizations remniscent of the velociraptors in the movie. At the end of the movie Alan Grant blows in it, confusing a pack of velociraptors.

There's a specific call that the movie has established as velociraptors in distress calling for help/backup from the pack, and Alan attempted to reproduce it when cornered at the beach to basically bluff/intimidate the pack into avoiding a fight. It coincided with the arrival of a helicopter, and the combined effect made the raptors run away.

Not explicitly a language as such, but specific calls with understandable, relatively complex meaning to the dinosaurs, that can be (sorta) understood and leveraged by humans.

Birds have a language, most mammals do too. Those languages are usually much simpler than ours though.

They communicate, but communication is not the same thing as language.

Or they communicate in languages we cannot understand.

Even among human languages the sounds of some languages sound all the same to humans who are not native speakers of that language.

Chinese for example has a million words that all sound like "shi" and other tonal languages like Vietnamese are also indistinguishable to English natives etc. Japanese people treat R/L the same.

Elephants and dolphins have been known to assign unique names for each other.

Octopuses and other cephalopods communicate by changing the color of their skin, EVEN WITH SOME OTHER FISH! BBC's Blue Planet has an episode where an octopus and a grouper fish coordinate via color to trap prey.

Ants and other insects communicate via pheromones and "smell".

Are you seriously going to stick to a human-chauvinistic stance that only we have a "language"?

I'm a linguist and yes I'll stick to that "human-chauvinistic stance until an animal can tell me otherwise.

"For over two decades, Professor Toshitaka Suzuki dedicated his life to studying the Japanese tit — a small songbird native to Japan’s forests. Through years of careful observation and experiments, he discovered something incredible: these birds use grammar-like rules and combine sounds to form meaning, much like how humans use language."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmys2abx4co

I'm familiar with this case. The "language" of the birds is so profoundly primitive (it's limited to 2 word combos where the meaning is just the meaning of both words). Here's a good blogpost about it.

https://facultyoflanguage.blogspot.com/2016/03/a-triple-of-r...

This takes more than just being a "linguist"; you need to be a biolinguist/xenolinguist :)

If we're going to be able to have a meaningful discussion on this, first you will need to provide for me the definition of language under which you're operating.

I mean there are space physicists who don't understand dark matter, etc.

I think this is a "qualia" issue: Like for example biologists can find out what kind of light frequencies the eyes of a mantis shrimp can receive, but we'll never know what it FEELS like to be able to see a zillion times more colors.

You can see this happen with human languages too: Ever walk around in a different country? your brain doesn't even register the sounds other people are making.

It turns out that the fact that mantis shrimp have 12 different color receptors in their eyes means they can see... 12 colors. They can't combine the input from the different color receptors into a spectrum like we and other vertebrates can. Their eyes even perceive different things in different regions of the compound eye. It's a surprisingly limited visual system for all its supposed extra capabilities compared to ours, which to your point makes "seeing like a mantis shrimp" even more inscrutable from our POV.

Nnnooooo they nerfed my hero!!

For anyone else whom the above awnsers absolutely nothing without googling what defines the boundary - A more verbose version of the above comment is that they communicate only simple, situational signals (like warning cries or information for action) and not using a symbolic, rule-governed system capable of abstraction, past and future tense, and infinite combination.

Of course, with all generalizations, this is sort of a lie, but no - whales, chimps and cephapods don't meet the official bar.

https://archive.ph/QX0Oo

Are all brains somehow able to visualize spiky waveforms and smooth ones?

which came first: the chicken or the egg? language.

Fun joke! Eggs are really old evolutionarily. Over 600 million years old if you count preamniotes.

You could still say that's recent on the evolutionary time span, given that life on Earth is ~3.5-3.7 billion years old. (Which is within the same order of magnitude as the age of the universe - which is itself wild to ponder.)

Chickens are a human invention.

It's fun to think about theropod language centers. Raptor kiki bouba.

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