DISCOURSE WITHOUT SYMBOLS; ORANGUTANS COMMUNICATE STRATEGICALLY IN RESPONSE TORECIPIENT UNDERSTANDING

摘要

When people are not fully understood, they persist with attempts tocommunicate, elaborating their speech in order to better convey their meaning.This combination of persistence and elaboration of signals is considered to be animportant criterion for determining intentionality in human infants (Bates et al.,1979; Golinkoff, 1986; Lock, 2001; Shwe & Markman 1997), and plays anessential role in human language, allowing us to clarify misunderstandings anddisambiguate meaning. Chimpanzees have been shown to use persistence andelaboration in requesting food items from an experimenter (Leavens et al.,2005), and so these abilities likely predate human symbolic communication.