ABSTRACT
The idea of animals talking like humans has obviously fascinated people across the centuries. This chapter explains how do animals communicate and what are the limits on animal communication. Primates are highly social animals, living in groups, and as a consequence non-human primates have a rich communicative repertoire, communicating by sound, touch, and smell, using gestures, facial expressions, grooming, and calls. Parrots and myna birds are very vocal and excellent mimics that can be trained to produce particular human-like sounds. Regardless of whether animals can't use language at all, or just have very limited abilities, they're clearly greatly inferior to humans. Even Kanzi, the superstar of the animal language world, is still equivalent in ability only to a toddler. Some chimps never seem to get the rudiments of language at all, however much effort is put into teaching them. Recursion gives language enormous power, and there is no unambiguous evidence that chimps learning language can use it.
