October 18, 2015

October 18, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This is my third response to “What do Animals Mean?” (2009) by D. Randall, M. Owren & M. Ryan. The difference between human speech and the vocalizations of nonhuman primates can never really be made clear without the distinction between Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). This distinction is biologically-based and is entire different from mentalistic constructs such as “exchange of semantic information”, “referential quality of human language”, “perspective taking” or “mental state attribution abilities.” When we compare “vocalizations of nonhuman primates to human speech” and take the SVB/NVB distinction in consideration, we find that we are not “fundamentally different.” Indeed, we are more similar than different.

The title of the paper was “What do Animals Mean?”, but this is usually interpreted as “What information do they convey?” The authors find this question, which, in animal research, is sometimes only implicitly asked, “ill-posed.” By being explicit about animal communication, they allow us to put our finger on something which is of great importance for humans. However, this will only become clear if we go one step further. Before we can say anything meaningful about nonhuman animal communication, we must clarify this question about human interaction: What do humans mean? Most of us think that we convey information to each other, but, each time we speak, we influence each other, like primates do, with the tone of our voice. Obviously, this is true, yet we have remained oblivious about this biological process as long as we kept thinking in terms of receiving, encoding and retrieving information. Not only have we been “casting animal communication systems in linguistic and informational terms”, we have been thinking and talking about our interactions with each other as if vocalizations have no meaning without language.

Before we can answer the question “What do Animals Mean?”, we must answer the question: what do humans mean? To answer this question without getting stuck in imaginary constructs, which didn’t and which couldn’t tell us anything useful about human interaction, we must pay attention to how we sound. This changes the question into: how does the sound produced by the speaker, regardless of the words that he or she uses, affect the nervous system of listener? This makes us aware that the sound of the speaker always influences the listener in one of two ways: it induces positive affect, a sense of safety and it will therefore elicit approach behavior or it will induce negative affect, a sense of threat and therefore it will elicit escape or avoidance behavior. The former sets the stage for SVB and the latter sets the stage for NVB. 

The authors conclude their paper with the statement “Although the loosely defined linguistic and informational constructs make convenient explanatory shorthand, they are problematic when elevated beyond metaphor and pressed into service as substantive explanation for the broad sweep of animal-signalling phenomena (Owren & Rendall 2001).” These “linguistic and informational constructs” haven’t allowed us to better understand human interaction either. “Metaphors” have made things worse as they didn’t and couldn’t bring us closer to our biology, to how we sound and most importantly to how the listener is affected by the speaker’s voice. We should be grateful to these researchers, who make us pay attention to “animal-signaling phenomena.”

If other researchers are going to follow their lead, they will have to change their way of talking about primates. This change in their way of talking involves the shift from NVB to SVB as only during SVB does the speaker pay attention to how his or her voice is perceived by the listener. Only in SVB can the speaker respond to the feedback he or she receives from the listener and adjust his or her voice so that the listener will not be aversively stimulated. In other words, due to the SVB/NVB distinction, at long last, we are becoming conscious of the importance of human-signalling phenomena.

When we compare human and animal signaling phenomena this will tremendously benefit our interaction. We will no longer be trapped by metaphorical constructs such as “information as a communicative commodity to be transferred, shared or exchanged.” Moreover, we will no longer overlook “important factors that shape functional signal design in different species”, our own species included. Also, we will engage in accurate, pragmatic “ethological inquiry and explanation.” By replacing “the traditional emphasis on information with an emphasis on influence that stays closer to basic evolutionary principles in ascribing signalers and perceivers distinct roles and potentially divergent interests in communication processes (Dawkins & Krebs 1978),” we will realize that the “divergent interests in communication processes” are always related to dominance hierarchies, which played a role in our evolutionary history, but which in our current environment threatens our survival. Stated differently, we understand that NVB is a behavioral vestige, which prevents progress of human relationship. “The corollary is that we must also accept that signaling phenomena will often entail asymmetries not generally observed or modelled in formal systems like language. These will include asymmetries in the mechanisms that support signal production in senders versus reception in perceivers, and functional asymmetries that leave signalers and perceivers at different points in the evolutionary dynamic. With this emphasis, the details of signal design are not arbitrary, or somehow secondary to the process of communicating, as they are thought to be in language, but rather they are absolutely central to it.”

In SVB we come out of the dark ages and dissolve “asymmetries in the mechanisms that support signal production in senders versus reception in perceivers.” Acknowledging the work of these animal researchers will make us more scientific about human interaction as we embrace the continuity of behavior in different species. I agree with these authors, who state that “animal signalling is likely to be key to working out the evolution of human communication behavior as well.” We will not “bias our discovery of ‘potential’ communalities” between primates and humans once we discriminate and talk about the SVB/NVB distinction.