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Well, I'm no experto, but, from Wikipedia:
The major finding of the wug test was that even very young children have already internalized systematic aspects of the linguistic system that enable them to produce plurals, past tenses, possessives, and other forms of words that they have never heard before. The test has been replicated many times, and it has proven very robust. It was the first experimental proof that young children have extracted generalizable rules from the language around them.
I'm not disputing that humans have the most advanced grammatic language by far. And that, as soon as the first few rules are learned (it's "around them"), even small children are capable of extrapolating correct uses of morphemes. In fact, the beaty of human language is how it uses a very restricted set of phonemes, morphemes and grammatical rules to correlate them to create such an almost infinite number of combinations to describe the the world around us and the world inside our heads (the "trick", as it is, is in the combinations). I just don't see why intelligent animals, like birs, dolphins, for instance, could not do the same, after a few generations of structuring similar rules. Keeo in mind that even our languages were once, about a 100 thousand years ago I guess, a collection of simple rumblings. Language has occurred so far only in this species of naked apes of ours, but I see no reason to believe that happened because we have some sort of genetic uniqueness towards it, it was only an accidental mishap (that's the thesis I'm defending).
In the anedoctal side, I remember one of those clever parrots ina some Disney side show I attended when I was a child. The handler presented a parrot who could make simple math operations (adding, subtractin, and even multuplying and dividing, if it didn't involve two digit figures). He dare the audience to test it.
"Ten plus five!" There goes the parrot, knocking a lever down 15 times.
"Two times three!" There goes the parrot, knocking a lever down 6 times.
"Seventeen minus fourteen!" There goes the parrot, knocking a lever down 3 times.
Then, some smartass kid comes with the following "Ten minus fifteen!"
The parrots looks confused to the kid, than to his handler, as if asking for directions. Then he goes about pulling the lever repeatedly, until the handler says "Stop that, or everybody will think you're crazy". At which moment everybody laughs, the parrots stops, and exits the stage, looking humiliated.
That's when I started believing parrots are people... |
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