What I'm saying is that there's no magic line that separates us from other animals in terms of intelligence or speech faculty. Millions of years of evolution have given us the cerebral hardware to communicate on a language basis, and it shouldn't surprise us that experiments with gorillas (for example) hit a threshold beyond which the animals are not equipped to communicate.
I too have kids, and heard plenty of lines like 'we goed outside' when they were young. If language were just mimicry, this would never happen: kids don't hear adults say that. Language is an internal grammatical structure that a kid is applying to what he hears, and he has yet to learn the exceptions to the rules. When he processes information he's filtering it through that instinctive language framework.
Do animals do the same thing? Not to nearly the same extent, it would seem. We can teach animals large vocabularies, but the framework humans have for language hasn't developed in them yet.
Before we bemoan the species-centric arrogance that humans display, let's at least admit that there's a less insidious effect to this condescension: we don't ascribe moral significance to animal behavior. If we don't give animals sufficient credit for their intelligence and capabilities, neither do we condemn them for acts we may otherwise consider reprehensible.
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