Harvard animal cognition expert Marc Hauser and associates tout the results of this recent study of theirs as identifying a ‘fundamental bottleneck on animal thought’, explaining why humans can string sentences together and other animals cannot. In the paradigm, monkeys read simple sentences would look at the speaker when the sentence was ungrammatical. However, with more complex sentence structures such as ‘if…then’ constructions, they could not tell the difference between what was well-formed and ill-formed grammatically. But does this really explain anything about the origins of the fundamental differences between how humans and other animals communicate with one another? Not that I can see — it is just one reflection of the difference in the level of complexity of the symbolic manipulation different species are capable of, along with other differences cited in the article, such as capacity for abstract representation (which seems to me a more fundamental difference, although admittedly related to capacity for complex grammatical structures) and potential vocabulary size. It might be illuminating to use fMRI, a technology of which FmH readers know I am quite fond, to watch what is happening in animal ‘language processing’ as it compares with human. —Yahoo! News