Practice question · Multiple choice
A communication system can show displacement without possessing productivity. What explains this divergence in the honeybee waggle dance?
Hints
- Does referring to a distant location require the ability to invent new messages?
- What fundamental structural constraint stops a bee from describing an unmapped route?
Show the answer
C. The dance conveys distant targets but cannot adapt to unprecedented paths
Why
Bee dances convey remote spatial coordinates without combining discrete units creatively. Lacking duality of patterning, the system cannot generate novel messages beyond its hardwired parameters. Animal communication relies on distinct structural blueprints rather than deficient forms of human syntax.
Practise Animal Communication
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More questions on Animal Communication
- A food source is placed directly above a beehive, reachable only by flying straight up. What happened in von…
- The honeybee waggle dance shows displacement, since it refers to a place the dancer is not at.
- Which are true of vervet alarm calls as established by the playback experiments?
- Sort each observation by whether it supports a RICH interpretation of ape language studies or a SCEPTICAL one.
- How many acoustically distinct alarm calls did the vervet studies establish?
- Complete the comparison of systems.
- Ape language studies are generally agreed to have demonstrated recursive, hierarchical syntax.