Animals can communicate but their communication is different from a language. Describe three ways in which animal communication and language differ

What will be an ideal response?

Answer: One characteristic of language is the duality of patterning. Meaningless sounds (phonemes) are combined to form meaningful units or morphemes. Further, the phonemes can be combined in a variety of ways to create a variety of meaningful units. Animal communication consists of one sound for a particular signal; the sounds are not combined in different ways to create new signals. Arbitrariness refers to the unpredictability between the sounds of a word and the meaning of the word. Human language is also generative in that morphemes, words, and sentences can be recombined to convey a limitless number of ideas. Related to generative capacity is recursion. Recursion refers to the embedding of pieces of a sentence in other pieces of a sentence or whole sentence. The vocal tract of humans and animals create certain sounds.