“Gavagai!” or the future history of the animal language controversy

@article{Premack1985GavagaiOT,
  title={“Gavagai!” or the future history of the animal language controversy},
  author={D. Premack},
  journal={Cognition},
  year={1985},
  volume={19},
  pages={207-296}
}
  • D. Premack
  • Published 1985
  • Medicine, Psychology
  • Cognition
Abstract In placing the attempts to teach language to nonhuman species in both a cultural and philosophical context, we consider evolutionary claims about the origins of human language, and Quine's indeterminacy of translation thesis. In contrasting the natural language acquired by humans with the artificial language taught nonhumans, we propose treating the human mind as a blend of learning, hard-wiring and cognition. We discuss the nature of each of the components, suggest how they may… Expand
View on Elsevier
s-f-walker.org.uk
254 Citations
Highly Influential Citations
2
Background Citations
55
Methods Citations
2
Results Citations
2

254 Citations

Citation Type

Citation Type

The faculty of language: what is it, who has it, and how did it evolve?
We argue that an understanding of the faculty of language requires substantial interdisciplinary cooperation. We suggest how current developments in linguistics can be profitably wedded to work in… Expand
The faculty of language: what is it, who has it, and how did it evolve?
We argue that an understanding of the faculty of language requires substantial interdisciplinary cooperation. We suggest how current developments in linguistics can be profitably wedded to work in… Expand
The Question of Capacity: Why Enculturated and Trained Animals have much to Tell Us about the Evolution of Language
  • H. Lyn
  • Psychology, Medicine
  • Psychonomic bulletin & review
  • 2017
TLDR
Experimental exploration of the capacities of nonhumans is the only option to determine which, if any, language-associated capacities are unique to humans. Expand
EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY AND THE ORIGINS OF LANGUAGE (Editorial for the special issue of Journal of Evolutionary Psychology on the evolution of language)
A naive observer would be forgiven for assuming that the field of language evolution would, in terms of its scope and methodologies, look much like the field of evolutionary psychol- ogy, but with a… Expand
Ever since language and learning: afterthoughts on the Piaget-Chomsky debate
TLDR
It is seen that recent developments in generative grammar, as well as new data on language acquisition, especially in the acquisition of pronouns by the congenitally deaf child, corroborate the "language specificity" thesis defended by Chomsky and refute the Piagetian hypothesis that language is constructed upon abstractions from sensorimotor schemata. Expand
Evolutionary Linguistics: A New Look at an Old Landscape
This article explores the evolution of language, focusing on insights derived from observations and experiments in animals, guided by current theoretical problems that were inspired by the generative… Expand
The evolution of language: Sharing our mental lives
Abstract There are two broad views on the evolution of language. One is that language involved a restructuring of thought, unique to humans, which occurred within the past 100,000 years. The other… Expand
The Language of Animal Language Research: Reply to Schusterman and Gisiner
Language, as a cognitive process, is a legitimate, fruitful area of study in animal cognition. Its study in animals should not be encumbered by proscriptions against the use of linguistic terms… Expand
Symbol and Structure: A Comprehensive Framework for Language Evolution
TLDR
An overall framework is proposed that would dissociate the symbolic element of language (words) from the structural element (syntax), since the two probably have distinct sources. Expand
The language faculty that wasn't: a usage-based account of natural language recursion
TLDR
It is argued that a language faculty is difficult to reconcile with evolutionary considerations, and that the authors' ability to process recursive structure does not rely on recursion as a property of the grammar, but instead emerges gradually by piggybacking on domain-general sequence learning abilities. Expand
...
1
2
3
4
5
...

References

SHOWING 1-10 OF 74 REFERENCES
The language bioprogram hypothesis.
It is hypothesized that creole languages are largely invented by children and show fundamental similarities, which derive from a biological program for language. The structures of Hawaiian Pidgin and… Expand
Apes and Language: The Search for Communicative Competence
In the years since Gardner and Gardner (1969), Patterson (1978), Premack (1972), and Rumbaugh, Gill, and Glaserfeld (1973) first demonstrated that apes could acquire a set of symbols (gestural signs,… Expand
Can an ape create a sentence?
TLDR
More than 19,000 multisign utterances of an infant chimpanzee (Nim) were analyzed for syntactic and semantic regularities, showing similar non-human patterns of discourse. Expand
A functional analysis of language.
  • D. Premack
  • Psychology, Medicine
  • Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior
  • 1970
TLDR
This paper tries to give the most general answers possible to the questions of language, general in the sense of relieving them of their exclusively human form. Expand
Animal languages and human language.
TLDR
The only way to find out how human language differs from any variety of communicative behavior manifested by non-human or pre-human species is to itemize those design-features of human language which seem to be of crucial importance in making it possible for language to do what it does. Expand
The Ontogenesis of Speech Acts.
A speech act approach to the transition from pre-linguistic to linguistic communication is adopted in order to consider language in relation to behaviour generally and to allow for an emphasis on the… Expand
Word and Object
TLDR
This edition offers a new preface by Quine's student and colleague Dagfinn Follesdal that describes the never-realized plans for a second edition of Word and Object, in which Quine would offer a more unified treatment of the public nature of meaning, modalities, and propositional attitudes. Expand
Chapter 2 - Higher Mental Functions of a Home-Raised Chimpanzee1
Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the higher mental functions of a home-raised chimpanzee. The use of human standards of comparison in determining the intellectual range of a nonhuman species… Expand
Formal Principles of Language Acquisition
TLDR
The authors of this book have developed a rigorous and unified theory that opens the study of language learnability to discoveries about the mechanisms of language acquisition in human beings and has important implications for linguistic theory, child language research, and the philosophy of language. Expand
Finitary models of language users
been proposed to describe talkers and listeners to describe the users of language rather than the language itself. As m was pointed out at the beginning of Chapter 12, our language is not merely the… Expand
...
1
2
3
4
5
...