TALKING TO EACH OTHERsounds denoting “R” and “L”, which don’t exist in Japanese. Babies who
were younger than nine months could hear the difference, but their
infant compatriots older than this could not.
We also know that when speaking to an infant, adults – in fact, even
children as young as four – adopt a slower, simpler, and more repeti-
tive style of speech, known as “motherese”, that ought to make it easier
for infants to learn from. It’s clear too that when interacting with their
children, parents tend to talk about whatever it is that their child is
Is language unique to humans?
We used to think that tool use was uniquely human, but then chimps
were seen using branches fashioned into rods to fish for termites.
Crows have also been spied using sticks to extract larvae from holes in
dead wood. That left language as the final preserve of human distinc-
tiveness. True, monkeys were known to have their alarm calls – one
each for eagle, snake, leopard and other threats – but crucially it was
thought that these were never combined to make sentences. Grammar
remained uniquely ours. But now some animals appear to have taken
the gloss off that achievement too. Late in 2009, Alban Lemasson, a
primatologist at the University of Rennes, reported instances of male
Campbell’s monkeys in the Ivory Coast combining their limited reper-
toire of six calls, “Boom, Krak, Hok, Hok-oo, Krak-oo, and Wak-oo”, to
create new meanings. To take just one example, a series of Boom calls
on their own was a message
for the rest of the group to
gather closer, whereas Boom
calls followed by a Krakoo was a
warning about falling branches.
Adding a Hok-oo to that series
created a new message about
a territorial threat from a neigh-
bouring monkey-group. This
isn’t evidence for complex
grammar of the kind seen in
human language, but it is a kind
of proto-syntax more complex
than anything seen in animals
before. Lemasson’s team
concluded that the evolution
of complex morphology
had “begun early in primate
evolution, long before the
emergence of hominids”.Male Campbell’s Monkeys have
developed a language with its own
rudimentary syntax.