Speak, Primate! Read, Human!

Orangutan language - reading for fun - gather round, children

Photo by Simone Millward on Unsplash

Orangutan language

Elephants and dolphins name each other. Whale songs get more complex every time we take a look. Carrion crows can count better than most human toddlers.

I’ve considered those examples of ‘talking’ animals in more detail in a previous post, but what about our close(r) cousins? After all, if we want to untangle the evolutionary roots of (our) language, listening to our primate relatives may help us figure out which parts of language are evolutionarily ancient, and which ones are newer.

As it turns out, our primate pals have a few linguistic tricks up their hairy arms.

A new study in chimpanzees finds that their calls appear in both compositional and non-compositional combinations, which is a whole lot of syllables to say that they can combine calls two ways. They can combine calls into a new call with a meaning that is a combination of its parts (compositional, as in give + banana = give me the banana), or into a new call with a different meaning (non-compositional, as in alarm + banana = I don’t want your mushy banana).

Such a system in nonhuman animals has never been documented and may be transitional between rudimentary systems and open-ended systems like human language.

But the trickiest and most mysterious among the great apes is the orangutan. Loners by nature they may be, but strangers to wordplay they are not. Listening to the chatter of female Sumatran orangutans recently revealed that orangutans embed three levels of recursion (a repetition of an element) in their long calls.

This provides,

… initial but important support to the notion that recursion, or at least temporal recursion, is not uniquely human among hominids and that its evolution was based on shared ancestry.

Meanwhile, our vocabulary has been shrinking (across all educational levels!)… Screw sleek marketing copy; bring back the glorious, overwrought, manifold exhortations of excessive introspections splattered onto virtual parchment.

Reading for fun

Talking about language… What about reading?

I don’t mean reading emails, social media captions, or top five tips to [insert recent short-lived hype]. No, I mean reading books. For (*gasp*) fun.

Despite the many benefits of reading fiction - improving empathy, sleep quality, and mental health, building anti-Alzheimer cognitive reserve, etc. - we’re reading for fun less and less. A preprint that tracks reading habits in the US between 2003 and 2023 finds a decline in readers who read for fun. From 29% of people reading for pleasure in 2003, we dropped to 18% in 2023.

The researchers suggest this may be due to a decline in leisure time, the replacement of reading by other media consumption, or a combination of both. Personally, I’d add the productivity cult sweeping the world that wrongfully thinks reading for fun is wasted time (but I’m biased). Read? Books? What’s the ROI? The KPI? Screw spelling out words, too inefficient. Acronyms galore. Reads faster. Short sentences. Bullet point summaries! Monetize! Click, comment, subscribe! Exclamation marks!

We’re tl;dr’ing what we should be r’ing in full, if we even r at all. We are collectively outsourcing writing and foregoing deep reading, both of which are, when judiciously applied, prime tools to develop empathy, personality, and critical thinking skills. Fortunately, the world is already overflowing with those (*cough* sarcasm *cough*).

Also concerning, even though 21% of the people in the dataset had young kids, only 2% read to them on an average day.

Gather round, children

What if I told you there is a magic spell that builds children’s vocabulary? Enhances their language skills overall? Maybe even supports their social and emotional development on top of it?

What if I told you that all you need to do to bring that magic alive is read it out loud?

This is what a recent research review finds for ‘home-based shared book reading’ in 28 studies that include close to 25,000 kids under the age of four. Echoing earlier research, this review finds that reading to kids, with kids, benefits their overall development, language skills, general vocabulary, and expressive vocabulary specifically (communicating their feelings, thoughts, and needs, which supports social and emotional development). We can’t deny that there is likely a role for the socioeconomic status of the parents at play here too, but that needs to be addressed by more research.

You probably can’t start soon enough. Even reading to your little one very early in infancy has these benefits. You could even tailor your book choices to the age and personality of your toddler — books with individual, named characters appear to have the most benefits early on, which makes sense. We are, after all, a social species. Of course, the more time parents spend on screens, the less time they’ll have or make to read for their kids…

In part, the magic of shared reading lies in simply talking to your toddler. Even 6-month-olds have a mental lexicon of common nouns, and talking to them (especially if it helps them label what they’re looking at or what you’re doing) encourages them to build mental connections between the words they hear. But that’s not all there is to the magic. So-called ‘book language’ often contains word choices and sentence structures that are not as common in spoken language, which further enriches the language and literacy skills of the little cutie pies.

In a way, you could see reading as a form of cognitive enrichment, and not just for the young ones among us. That last linked study notes that,

… reading experience shapes people’s minds and becomes associated with a range of skills and abilities across the life span.

If you read all the way to the end, you just did your brain a favor.

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