ABSTRACT
It is generally accepted that communication among members of animal species is widespread and that most vertebrates transmit information by acoustic signals. The variety and ingenuity of these communicative systems have stimulated a great deal of research in animal communication and its comparison with human speech. Communication among members of animal species is universal because it is important to their survival; it takes place whenever one organism receives a signal that has originated with another. The greatest amount of research on animal communication since World War II has been devoted to nonhuman primates, especially the chimpanzees. If human language is unique among the many known systems of communication that exist in the animal kingdom, then it must possess some features of design not to be found elsewhere. Human languages possess all these design features, whereas the communicative systems of other animals possess only some.
