Cultural transmission

While you may inherit brown eyes and dark hair from your parents, you do not inherit their language. An infant born to Korean parents (who have never left Korea and speak only Korean), which is adopted and brought up from birth by English speakers in the United States, may have physical characteristics inherited from its natural parents, but it will inevitably speak English. A kitten, given comparable early experiences, will produce meow regardless.

This process whereby language is passed on from one generation to the next is described as cultural transmission. While it has been argued that humans are born with an innate predisposition to acquire language, it is clear that they are not born with the ability to produce utterances in a specific language, such as English. The general pattern of animal communication is that the signals used are instinc­tive and not learned.

In the case of some birds, however, there is evidence that instinct has to combine with learning (or exposure) to produce the right song. If those birds spend their first seven weeks without hearing other birds, they will instinctively produce songs or calls, but these songs will be abnormal in some way. Human infants, growing up in isolation, produce no 'instinctive' language. Cultural transmission of a specific language is crucial in the human acquisition process.

Discreteness

The sounds used in language are meaningfully distinct. For example, the difference between a ‘b’ sound and a ‘p’ sound is not actually very great, but when these sounds are part of a language like English, they are used in such a way that the occurrence of one rather than the other is meaningful. The fact that the pronunciation of the forms ‘pack’ and ‘back’ leads to a distinction in meaning can only be due to the difference between the p and h sounds in English. This property of language is described as discreteness. Each sound in the language is treated as discrete. It is possible, in fact, to produce a range of sounds in a continuous stream which are all generally like the p and b sounds. These physically different sounds could be conceived of as the spo­ken counterpart of a written set: b – p.

Duality

Language is organized at two levels or layers simultaneously. This property is called duality, or 'double articulation'. In terms of speech production, we have the physical level at which we can produce individual sounds, like n, b and i. As individual sounds, none of these discrete forms has any intrinsic meaning. When we produce these sounds in a particular combination, as in bin, we have another level producing a meaning which is different from the meaning of the combination in nib. So, at one level, we have distinct sounds, and, at another level, we have distinct meanings. This duality of levels is, in fact, one of the most economical features of human language, since with a limited set of distinct sounds we are capable of producing a very large number of sound combinations (e.g. words) which are distinct in meaning.

It is obvious that, although your dog may be able to produce woof, it does not seem to be a feature of the canine repertoire that the w, oo and f elements can be separated out as a distinct level of production. If your dog could operate with the double level (i.e. duality), then you might expect to hear oowf and even foow, each with different meanings.