14 DAY TRIAL // In a new groundbreaking study, experts have managed to demonstrate that cotton-top tamarins are able to identify the words in which syllables are placed in an incorrect order. The find holds a great significance for studying the origin of language, and especially for its non-verbal components, which the scientists say we share with many other species, without even knowing. Details of the experiments are published in the latest issue of the journal Biology Letters.
During the tests, tamarin groups were played words containing only two syllables, but in which one of them kept repeating. This particular group of letters was placed either at the end of the word, or at the beginning, depending on the tamarin group selected. The animals were played these sounds for about half an hour, and then left to rest. The following day, researchers played the same two-syllable words, only this time they mixed the words with the “correct” syllable settings with others, in which the letter group fell in the other part of the word, respectively.
The main goal of the research, the BBC News informs, was to discover the origins of prefixes and affixes, which are used in most human languages around the world to indicate tense. The scientists said that this test allowed them to discover certain aspects of the non-spoken language that we might share in common with our primate cousins. It became immediately clear that the animals tested were using the same patterns for communication that we did, a discovery that, if followed, could lead to a better understanding of how language formed at first, from a sea of sounds.
“In the prefixation condition, they heard 'shoy-bi,' 'shoy-la,' 'shoy-ro' and so on. The idea is that they get used to the pattern if you play it long enough. The 'suffixation' group heard words with a changing first syllable, this time with the suffix, 'shoy,' kept consistent – such as 'bi-shoy' and 'la-shoy,'” Ansgar Endress, who has been the lead author of the new research, told the British news outlet. The expert is a postdoctoral student in the Cognitive Evolution Laboratory, and in the Department of Linguistics at the Harvard University.
When it came to the second assessment, the following day, “We simply measured how often the monkeys looked to the speaker when we played the items. If they got used to, or bored by, the pattern, then they might be more interested in items that violate (it) – because they are something new – than in items that are consistent with the pattern,” he explained.
“Simple temporal ordering is shared with non-human animals. This has an important role. In bird song or whale song, for example, there's a temporal ordering to the notes and that's critical for communication. In primates, this ordering is vital for learning. In tool use, primates learn from each other that you do this first, then you do that, then it's that. As a child learns to use the past tense, they may generalize and use a suffix wrongly, but they will never generalize in the wrong direction. You never hear them say ed-walk instead of walked,” Harvard University Departments of Psychology, Organismic & Evolutionary Biology, and Biological Anthropology Professor Marc Hauser concluded.