Dolphins in two separate research centers understood the words, presenting convincing evidence that dolphins employ a universal sono-pictorial language of communication.
Hmm... I would have assumed that interpreting dolphin sounds as pictures is the first thing you'd try after realizing they can echolocate... Is this really the first time that's been explored? Or is it just that no one's been able to figure out how to reconstruct an image properly from dolphin clicks, but it was already a widely suspected possibility for a long time? (I'm not really up to date with dolphin research, unfortunately.)
If they're right about this line of reasoning, then I wouldn't be surprised at all if they come back and point out an animation structure soon (akin to sound detection of a moving object over time) -- and if that's the case, I'd bet you that it isn't "universal", and that different groups of dolphins will have different variants in how they communicate more complex concepts. For example, one group might give an animation of a dolphin swimming around something in one direction a meaning that a different group might disagree with. Another sort of animation that might be interesting to look for would be a change in the composition/texture of an object (e.g. animation of dolphin turning to stone, or stone turning into dolphin or something like that). It seems reasonable to me that even if you communicate in animated 3d images, you'd probably still have to have some less literal meanings too... and the sorts of things you could represent with something like that could get pretty complex, actually.
[In response to responder: Actually I think developing complex language with something like this would be relatively easy. With human language we can't just show a series of events with our words, people need to experience the things with us and then we develop common words to describe them again later. With their system of communication it seems that they could describe pretty much anything they'd find notable and also easily abstract things by just making their clicks less specific or by blending a few specific examples as a form of abstraction. Actually I'd bet on blending first, maybe even a literal superposition of all the possibilities or several of them. Also they might be able to communicate by acting things out physically while they are sounding things out. The combination could be pretty powerful for expression.]
I'm still quite skeptical that the dolphins have complex shared language with features like recursion, but it's possible that the storytelling via pictures could get complex... I guess we'll see.
It may be possible, but I can imagine that it would be very very difficult for us to grasp since if this research is verified we'd likely have so little in common linguistically. It strikes me as kind of like "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra".
Yup, I think what is novel here and led to these results is that the dolphin researchers invented a device for generically converting audio into pictures.
Seems like a pretty cranky group unfortunately. (in the sense of astrology, physics cranks, etc.) :(
I'm thinking they may have just found a roundabout way of visualizing echolocation response rather than visualizing dolphin-dolphin communication as images. Guessing on the bits I've gathered from the various articles linked, it sounds like what they did was something like:
- have a dolphin ping various objects with echolocation and record the response
- play back the response for different dolphins and reward the dolphins with fish if they retrieve the object that matches the recording
- see how good the dolphins are figuring out the mapping from sounds to objects (pretty good)
That's just my guess of what they did; as I said, it's not clear. (If that's actually what they did, that doesn't really indicate language capability, although it's still interesting.) Hopefully they clarify what their methodology was.
Hmm... I would have assumed that interpreting dolphin sounds as pictures is the first thing you'd try after realizing they can echolocate... Is this really the first time that's been explored? Or is it just that no one's been able to figure out how to reconstruct an image properly from dolphin clicks, but it was already a widely suspected possibility for a long time? (I'm not really up to date with dolphin research, unfortunately.)
If they're right about this line of reasoning, then I wouldn't be surprised at all if they come back and point out an animation structure soon (akin to sound detection of a moving object over time) -- and if that's the case, I'd bet you that it isn't "universal", and that different groups of dolphins will have different variants in how they communicate more complex concepts. For example, one group might give an animation of a dolphin swimming around something in one direction a meaning that a different group might disagree with. Another sort of animation that might be interesting to look for would be a change in the composition/texture of an object (e.g. animation of dolphin turning to stone, or stone turning into dolphin or something like that). It seems reasonable to me that even if you communicate in animated 3d images, you'd probably still have to have some less literal meanings too... and the sorts of things you could represent with something like that could get pretty complex, actually.