The Intentional Communication of Great Apes | Michael Tomasello (2006)

MICHAEL TOMASELLO
Origins of Human Communication

Monday May, 15th, 2006
CNRS, Campus Gérard-Mégie, Auditorium Marie Curie
3, rue Michel-Ange, 75794 Paris Cedex 16.

Lecture 1: The Intentional Communication of Great Apes

Apes communicate with conspecifics most flexibly in the gestural domain, including adapting to the attentional state of the recipient. They use both intention movements (abbreviations of social actions that become communicative within a specific interactive context) and attention getters (actions that gain the attention of others to the self in a wide variety of contexts). All of these are basically dyadic - aimed at regulating the social interaction directly - not triadic in the sense of referring to external entities. They are also all basically "competitive" - aimed at getting the signaler what she wants - not co-operative in the sense of sharing psychological states. Interestingly, when interacting with humans many apes do learn to "point" to things they want triadically. But these "points" are action imperatives only ; they are not co-operative in the human sense (and may not even be truly referential), as evidenced by the fact that these pointing apes still do not understand when humans point for them informatively.

[declup]

(circa 15:33): "I would say, if anything, ... some monkeys have more sophisticated vocalizations than apes.... There's no pointing. Apes don't point.... There's no iconic gestures like 'do this' or 'get me the one that goes like this', not even when they want something. And none of this is collaborative... in the sense that there's no negotiation of meaning and like 'uh-huh, what did you mean?', so there's no repair sequences, no requests for clarification.... You'll see nothing in any non-human animals that would... look like a request for clarification."

(circa 17:19) "I just told you great apes don't point for one another, and they don't in the wild, but great apes do point for humans.... About 60 or 70 percent of captive chimps will point imperatively for humans."

(circa 19:22) social tool use: "I'm using you as a tool to open this box for me."

(circa 19:58) "But there's no declarative pointing.... (This is 'altruistic pointing', if you will.)"