If They're So Good at Grammar, Then Why Don't They Talk? Hints From Apes' and Humans' Use of Gestures

Abstract

I address the question of “animal precursors to language” by focusing on the symbolic or functional, that is, communicative, dimension. I look first at the communicative activities of our nearest primate relatives, the great apes, with a special focus on their communicative gestures, which are much more sophisticated from a functional point of view than are their vocalizations. I then compare great ape gestural comunication to the prelinguistic gestures of human infants (especially pointing) and the cognitive and social-cognitive skills underlying these: such things as joint attention, communicative intentions (intentions about intentional states), and the motivation to share experience with others. I end by arguing that the reason both the pointing gesture and linguistic conventions come naturally to humans, but not to other great apes, is because they both rely on a common social-cognitive, social-motivational infrastructure of shared intentionality.