Monkey Talk
Wired Magazine has a layman's article about the discovery that monkeys do speak to each other. (See http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/12/monkey-talk/)
While the speech syntax and semantics used by the monkeys are rudimentary, it nevertheless IS language. This may be news to some people, but as a computational linguist and a dog owner I am not surprised by this news. My dog, Polo (female), can definitely learn from repeated examples and rewards.
For example, she love car rides. She also knows that I typically use the car in the evenings to fetch mum from the MRT station. As a result, she would not even budge when I call her to the car in the mornings or afternoons. The same cannot be said about evenings, as she would get very excited, jumping about and even bark at me for a car ride.
Of course, she understands all the standard dog commands such as sit, stand, roll over. So if a dog is able to discern human noises, monkeys can surely recognize monkey noises.
While the speech syntax and semantics used by the monkeys are rudimentary, it nevertheless IS language. This may be news to some people, but as a computational linguist and a dog owner I am not surprised by this news. My dog, Polo (female), can definitely learn from repeated examples and rewards.
For example, she love car rides. She also knows that I typically use the car in the evenings to fetch mum from the MRT station. As a result, she would not even budge when I call her to the car in the mornings or afternoons. The same cannot be said about evenings, as she would get very excited, jumping about and even bark at me for a car ride.
Of course, she understands all the standard dog commands such as sit, stand, roll over. So if a dog is able to discern human noises, monkeys can surely recognize monkey noises.
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NLP
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