Prelinguistic Infants, but Not Chimpanzees, Communicate About Absent Entities

Ulf Liszkowski; Marie Schäfer; Malinda Carpenter; Michael Tomasello

doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02346.x

Prelinguistic Infants, but Not Chimpanzees, Communicate About Absent Entities

Ulf Liszkowski¹; Marie Schäfer²; Malinda Carpenter²; Michael Tomasello²

¹ Communication Before Language Group, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands · ² Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany

Psychological Science 2009

One of the defining features of human language is displacement, the ability to make reference to absent entities. Here we show that prelinguistic, 12-month-old infants already can use a nonverbal pointing gesture to make reference to absent entities. We also show that chimpanzees—who can point for things they want humans to give them—do not point to refer to absent entities in the same way. These results demonstrate that the ability to communicate about absent but mutually known entities depends not on language, but rather on deeper social-cognitive skills that make acts of linguistic reference possible in the first place. These nonlinguistic skills for displaced reference emerged apparently only after humans' divergence from great apes some 6 million years ago.

DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02346.x
Volume: 20 (5)
Pages: 654-660
Language: en
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Sources: crossref