If I Could Talk to the Animals

by Dianne Loyet

 

Some time ago in this space I wrote about the languages cat lovers use when talking with their pets (“Why Can’t I Haz Grammar?”). Now a handful of articles in the popular press have made me think about how animals communicate with others of their own species: do they in fact have languages?

When I first began studying language, the conventional wisdom about animal communication was that it did not have all the characteristics of human language. The bees, for example, were said to do a ‘waggle dance’ that told other bees where to find nectar; my textbook said the waggle dance was communication but not a language because it could not be used for any other purpose. 

To find out what modern researchers are saying about animal language, I started with an article titled “The Faculty of Language,” by Marc Hauser, Noam Chomsky, and W. Tecumseh Fitch–big names in linguistics. According to this article, there are three components to what the authors call faculty of language broad (FLB) (Hauser et al., 2002). 

The first component of FLB, the sensory-motor system, is how living things act and adjust their actions to achieve a goal. It includes, among other things, an organism’s speech apparatus (if they have one). For example, I may say the English word “vehicle” and hear that I have incorrectly pronounced the “h,” which is silent. I could then correct myself by repeating the word without pronouncing the “h”. It is my speech apparatus, among other things, that enables me to say the word, and my sensory system which allows me to hear what I’ve said.

The next component of FLB, the conceptual-intentional system, is the cognitive capacity to see how a set of characteristics are all associated with a thing (Mendil-Girol, 2019). For example, due to the human conceptual-intentional system we can associate the characteristics “round, food, sweet” with the object we call a 

“donut”. This component is particularly important for vocabulary.

The final component of FLB is another cognitive ability, recursion, which is also sometimes referred to as nesting. Recursion means, “. . . providing the capacity to generate an infinite range of expressions from a finite set of elements,” (Hauser et al., 2002). English sentences with adjective clauses are considered to be a good example of recursion. An example is the sentence below, in which the main clause (The cat is sleeping) is in bold, and the adjective clause (that chased the rat) is in Italics:

The cat that chased the rat is sleeping.

So, do any animals have at least one of the components of FLB? Is there a single animal that has all three components? As you might expect, most if not all animals have a sensory-motor system, and any part of the body (or the whole body, like the bees) could be considered a speech  apparatus. These, however, vary widely across species, producing communication as diverse as the calls of humpbacked whales and the neighs of horses. Primates are known for making both sounds and gestures. According to Carl Zimmer of the New York Times, “. . . over 80 meaningful gestures [are] made by not only chimpanzees, but also bonobos, gorillas and orangutans” (2024). In humans the articulatory system comprises the vocal cords and the various parts of the mouth. Many other primates also have vocal cords and mouths with similar structures. In addition to the trumpeting that we’re familiar with, elephants also generate ultrasonic utterances, which we can’t hear, but which they can sense with their feet. So, it seems probable that some animals can make some kinds of sounds needed for a verbal language. 

But is there evidence that animals have the cognitive components of FLB—the conceptual-intentional or recurrence components? As indicated above, the conceptual-intentional component includes the ability to relate ideas to each other and form concepts. This ability is involved in, among other things, noticing that certain qualities are always or almost always true of a category of things. For example, our distant ancestors used the conceptual-intentional component when they assigned a label “rain” to the category of things that is “water, falling from the sky, not frozen, etc.” If we can find examples of animals using nouns, or better yet actually creating new ones, then they may have a conceptual-intentional component. One demonstration of a conceptual-intentional component could be naming, and according to CBC Radio, researchers think elephants may call each other by name (2024). CBC interviewed Cornell biologist Mickey Pardo, one of the authors of a 2024 study published in the journal Nature, Ecology and Evolution, who described the study. They said that researchers recorded sounds made by a group of elephants. Within the data they identified repeated segments of sound recorded as possible names and the probable bearers of those names. Last, they played the isolated segments back to the same group of elephants. Although only 28% of the time did the expected elephant respond to the hypothesized “name,” the researchers considered this significant. They pointed out that when they played sequences without any pattern, elephants responded only 8% of the time (less than 1/3 as often).

The final component of FLB, recursion, has been studied very conceptually in animals. Two recent studies (2020 and 2022) used a similar research design with different animal subjects; the first used monkeys, the second crows. (The first study also included adults and children from the US and Bolivia.) In both studies, participants were introduced to two recursive sequences visually.  The sequences looked similar to this:

{ [] }

 { () }

In each case, the inner brackets are nested within the outer brackets, representing a recursive sequence similar to that found in the English sentence mentioned previously:

The cat that chased the rat is sleeping.

In the study, subjects were trained to choose the elements of a recursive sequence in order. Training consisted of rewards for producing recursive sequences when asked for them, and negative stimuli for failing to do so. When training was complete, the subjects were given a trial in which they were expected to complete the same task that they had been trained on. The frequency of correct responses were recorded as well as the frequency of two incorrect response sequences: crossed patterns like [ ( ] ) or “tail-embedded” patterns like [ ] (  ). The frequency of each type of response was statistically analyzed. All of the human participants produced responses with recursion at a statistically higher rate as compared to their production of nonrecursive responses. Of the animal participants in the two studies, the crows produced a statistically higher number of recursive sequences, but the monkeys did not. Unfortunately, because only two crows participated in the study, no conclusions vis a vis the crow population can be drawn; we cannot say, based on this research, that crow cognition includes the concept of recursion.

 

So, card carrying scientists have thus far attempted to determine whether animals of various kinds have the components of FLB, and their work is promising but inconclusive. But recently another line of enquiry has begun: the data of pet owners is being analyzed by a UC San Diego animal scientist, Federico Rossano (PBS NewsHour, 2025). Rossano’s work is exciting not only because it involves citizen scientists, but because it includes so many participants– ten thousand dogs in forty-seven countries.

 

Rosanno’s work started because of the popularity of the product called a “button board” in pet circles. Button boards are designed primarily for use with dogs. They consist of boards on which there are several knobs (called buttons) about the size of a large dog’s paw, and each button is labeled and with a phrase such as “outside” or “treats”. When the button is pushed, the animal who has pushed it hears the phrase aloud. In this way, pets learn to associate an action (such as going outside) with a specific button press on their board and with the phrase that is uttered aloud. Pet owners have had success with training their dogs to communicate using button boards.  Rossano learned about the popularity of these button boards and realized that it was possible to use all these citizen scientists and their animal companions to do research on animal cognition and animal language. Over several months, Rossano studied the button pushes and video of the accompanying behavior of the animals. His research is not completed, but his first research report concluded that dogs can comprehend human words and can offer contextually appropriate responses.

 

So, what is the state of animal language research? It’s complicated. Animals come in such a variety of shapes and sizes that one of the research tasks is to determine just what ways and means they might be using to communicate and perceive each other’s messages. The elephants, for example, perceive some messages with their feet. And studying cognitive concepts such as recursion is difficult even in humans.

Remember the bees and their waggle dance? It turns out that the story is more complicated than my textbooks let on. Austrian-German ethologist Karl Von Frisch was awarded the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for explaining how the bees’ behavior communicated a source of honey. However, a competing theory developed by biologist Adrian Wenner is that the bees are only moving in a way that looks like a dance because it dislodges the scent molecules which they picked up at a source of nectar. These scent molecules can then be used by other bees to find the same sources of nectar. So, in my own estimation at least, this alleged means of animal communication has to be downgraded from “communication but not language,” to “possibly not communication at all.” 

 

References

Ferrigno S., Cheyette S. J., Piantadosi S. T., Cantlon J. F., (2020) Recursive sequence generation in monkeys, children, U.S. adults, and native Amazonians. Sci. Adv. 6, eaaz1002. [DOI]

Goodyear, S. (2024 June 11). Scientists use machine learning model to ID unique rumbles elephants use to address one another. https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/elephant-names-1.7231387 

Hauser, M.D., Chomsky, N. and W. Tecumseh Fitch. (2002). The faculty of language: What is it, who has it, and how did it evolve?” Science. Volume 298: 1569-1579.

Liao DA, Brecht KF, Johnston M, and Nieder A. (2022). Recursive sequence generation in crows. Sci Adv. 2022 Nov 4;8(44):eabq3356. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.abq3356. Epub 2022 Nov 2. PMID: 36322648; PMCID: PMC9629703.

Mendil-Girol, Jose-Luis. (2019). “Biology and Culture in Language.” Inference. 4(4): July.

PBS NewsHour. (2025, January 29). Look who’s talking: How button boards are changing human-canine communication. [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czLwLol6eHY

WELLS, P., WENNER, A. Do Honey Bees have a Language?. Nature 241, 171–175 (1973). https://doi.org/10.1038/241171a0

Zimmer, C. (2024). Why do apes make gestures? The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/06/science/chimpanzee-gestures-language.html