Michael Owren

1. Can nonlinguistic signaling be understood without resorting to the teleology of using explicitly or implicitly lingusitic concepts? Is that teleology inherently damaging to the enterprise of understanding communication in either nonhumans or humans?
2. While human language capabilities appear to be the foundation of explicit knowledge, language knowledge itself is implicit. In other words, whereas language appears central in controlled, conscious processing, cognitive structures linking sounds to representations, controlling syntactical sequencing, and so on are not similarly accessible. Does this observation have implications for the evolution of speech? In other words, did critical changes occur at implicit or explicit levels?
3. Verbal communication in humans can be said to require matching representations in senders and receivers. In forming a signal, the sender draws on codes corresponding to cognitive or emotional processes, and shows the evident intention of activating something similar in a receiver. It is often said that in the development of this system, "comprehension precedes production" in an infant or child. Could the opposite also occur in speech development, with "production preceding comprehension," or would this make it a fundamentally different system?

• Is it useful to draw a distinction between "signaling" on the one hand, and "communication" on the other, with sender intention creating the crucial difference? Although "intentionality" is difficult to define, treat it as the sender's ability to tailor signal form and timing to the evident information needs of the receiver. One way to approach this question might be consider whether intentionality exists discretely, or forms a continuum.

1. Why animals don't have language?, D. L. Cheney and R. M. Seyfarth.
2. Sound on the rebound: bringing form and function back to the forefront in understanding nonhuman primate vocal signaling, M. J. Owren and D. Rendall.
3. Functional referents and acoustic similarity: field playback experiments with rhesus monkeys, M. D. Hauser.

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