Language Affixation In Non-Human Primates

This research group, which included Harvard psychologist Marc Hauser (author of the "humaniqueness" concept), wondered, while stating firmly that genuine language competence was unique to humans, whether or not components - building-blocks - of language competence could be found in monkeys. Using cotton top tamarins they show that the monkeys can discriminate bisyllabic words that either start (prefix) or end (suffix) with the same syllable. This is similar to the affixation rule we use to inflect words, for instance with the past tense, as in walk/walked. They conclude - in their abstract: "These results suggest that some of the computational mechanisms subserving affixation in a diversity of languages are shared with other animals, relying on basic perceptual or memory primitives that evolved for non-linguistic functions."