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Comment by astrange | Hacker News Reader

Chimpanzees are intelligent and willing to do something like communicating, and can maybe produce words/signs, but they don't produce sentences/syntax and they never ask questions. Supposedly parrots can do that one.

Related question: which animals understand humans pointing at things?

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There are a number of interesting videos on social media sites ostensibly demonstrating dogs and birds using buttons and tablets to generate reasonably coherent communication like might be expected out of a two year old. Some of these have some backing scientific literature that provide some validation of the claims. If true it would indicate they have quite advanced mental faculties and are basically entirely limited by the lack of a appropriate vocal system for generating human speech.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bunny_(dog)

[2] https://youtube.com/@jenc2394

Rigorous research on speech and communication in non-humans

https://www.theycantalk.org/research

Those are less than "sentences" because word order doesn't matter and they're not recursive (so they can't go on forever).

This is overly pedantic. How many conversations with a two year old have you had?

Word order does not matter, recursion doesn't matter (a two year old can make a sentence go on forever without recursion even)

Two year olds learn a lot more language in a year than chimps can. Can't have a sentence like "dog bites man" without word order even if it's made of logograms.

My dogs when I drop crumbs on the ground

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