Hi Phat,
quote:
I mean, a dog barks the same in China as in Cleveland. A Cats meow sounds the same the world over.
At the risk of coughing up more hash, I don't think that's true. Dogs are thought to show regional variation in their vocalisations. Birds certainly do.
I think that the main difference is in how the vocalisation is hard-wired into the brain. Take this example of a cruel, yet fascinating experiment on chaffinches.
take some newly-laid birds' eggs, incubate them separately in soundproof chambers, hand-rear each young one (also in individual and acoustic isolation) and then see as each bird grew up what sounds it produced. At Cambridge, England, some chaffinches were reared in these exacting conditions. Even when nearly a year old they sang very simple songs, representing as the experiment intended, the inborn component of the song. In the wild, a young bird would add the finer details during the first few weeks of its life, having learnt them from its father and other cock chaffinches within hearing;
Source There are some sonographs and audio samples on that page.
In the finches, part of the actual song is hard-wired. The isolated finches' song was still recognisably chaffinch-like, but it was not well developed. This is markedly different to humans, where all that is hard-wired is the propensity to learn language; the actual specifics of the language are learnt. An English baby brought up by Chinese parents would surely have no difficulty learning Mandarin.
Perhaps specific languages are hard-wired to some extent, but far less than in animals. That strikes me as the major difference between human and animal vocalisations.
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