While there is an innate drive to communicate among humans, actual language is more something parents teach to children rather than children arriving at organically. Your cat isn’t making any attempt to teach your child its “language” unlike parents reading Pat the Bunny or requesting “say Dada” for endless hours.
Children don’t really need to be taught. They will pick up language as long as they are exposed to it. Active engagement helps, but is not required. A child who is neglected and not engaged with might have some language difficulties, but will not be completely lacking in language skills.
I question the premise - toddlers do usually know all sorts of animal sounds. In fact they tend to learn them pretty early on in their language development.
Yes, and the more articulate ones enhance their vocabulary with a multi-lingual dictionary, which enables them to converse at length.
To some extent they do, though their parents talk them out of it as the adults don’t believe that it is animal communication.
Also there was a series of ‘feral children’, and those raised with animals as animals develop their sounds and mannerisms.
It isn’t “communication” any more than simply yelling at your dog when he eats your sandwich.
There’s a difference between communication and language. Dogs communicate, but they don’t have language (as far as we know). For example: Dog wagging tail = I’m good! That is communication. When a dog pees on a tree, he’s saying “I’ve been here”, in not so many words.
That’s my point. Making animal sounds is not learning animal “language.”
Making animal sounds can sometimes be communication, even if it’s not language. Many animals communicate with sounds, and it’s possible to imitate those sounds and communicate the message that sound is supposed to communicate.
I talk to animals myself, quite successfully and effectivelhy. There are a few splecies of birds that specialize in being the watchdog for flocks of birds. In North America, the chickadees are an example, and if a threatening stranger, like a housecat or a raptor, passes by, the chickadees will set up a fuss, causing the other birds to become alert, often with conspicuous movement or coming out from cover so they can see the danger. Ive learned to duplicate the alarm call of the chickadee, and when i make the sound, I am “talking to” the other birds, lying to them, telling them to go to an open space and have a cautionary look around. From which I can see them more easily. It is a verbal language that they understand.
Exactly. Learning a language is something where a toddler learns to associate sounds with concepts, thanks to feedback. They learn “do you want a drink?” followed by a drink. (IIRC this is almost analogous to the breakthrough Helen Keller described for herself). “Hello” is the greeting when someone appears. If you are asking someone else to do something, say “Please”. “Do you need to go potty?” …and given names. Humans learn to associate different sounds with different concepts, and the need to use these concepts to get what they want. Animals lack the vocabulary, both the variety and the associating of certain sounds with certain concepts beyond simple emotions - annoyed, hurting, happy purr, playful, etc. They also lack the conceptual ability and persistence to specifically exercise teaching this to children, the way humans do. After a few hundred thousand years (or more) our brains have evolved to pick up these patterns.
Also note, common wisdom(?) is in those rare cases where a child is not exposed to language during the correct formative time, they fail to develop the appropriate language skills.
On top of that, humans have remarkably varied voice-boxes, but they are poor at faithfully reproducing a number of animal sounds. But that doesn’t matter, because animals don’t necessarily provide the appropriate feedback if a child does approximate the sound required.
Right, I think most people do things like this with animals at one point or another–so then what exactly is the question in the OP? You seem to be positing some deeper level of language that you think children could be capable of, which they could accomplish because they are children, and it would be analogous to how they learn human language. Or are you simply asking, “Why don’t children do the things that adult do with animals?”
Your proved my point, and when you continually tell a child this they eventually tend to believe it. Grow up to retell this to their children.
It has to do with the trust a child must place in a adult in order to learn. The child must accept the adult as a authority figure, and that instruction causes the learned language to be forgotten and filed under ‘nonsense’, which you displayed very well here.
Adults don’t try because they have advanced beyond the point at which they have enough to talk about with animals and it is not worth the dedicated effort, so they give up. But small children, still learning the rudiments of language, often bond with pets closely enough that they have as stirring interest in a relationship.
But animals don’t seem to learn inter-species communications, either. So it may be because an organism has an intuitive perception of which species it is a member of, and is inclined to restrict or resist learning to communicate with other species.
adulst
As a little kid I decided a cat’s principle vocalization (meow) was just an auditory carrier signal to modulate a psychic message. If you’re just listening to the sound, as with human language, all you pick up is “meoooow.” But if you’re hip to cats, you know to focus on the subtext embedded within the auditory component. With some experiment and effort, I believed I was able to engage Kitty in two-way communications by concentrating on my message while broadcasting the carrier vocalization. We didn’t have much to talk about (despite harboring an incredible array of nuanced personalities, cats in general don’t exactly nurture a great encyclopedia of ideas), but we were both pretty clearly excited by the breakthrough. I’m older and wiser now, and as such have lost the knack for conversing with cats. Nevertheless, I generally understand what they want and they understand whether or not I will be of service to them.
Actually, some species of birds do seem to have given names, distinctive sounds which their parents will make when they want to get the attention of one particular chick.
Which is still a far cry from what humans would call language. Language isn’t just a matter of having words; it’s in how you put them together.
Exactly - the rudiments of language. A specific sound means a certain thing, in this case “Listen up, Poindexter!” the problem is that most animals do not have a "language beyond this specific example, other than nuanced grunts or howls, etc. that convey emotion but not much else.
Humans have gone so much further. Speculation on the path of evolution suggests that the need for cooperative behaviour - so necessary for hunting large game for example, or distributing other tasks - leads to a progressively more nuanced sounds until it morphs into specific sound-to-concept associations for more and more specific concepts.
I think I pretty much did learn to talk to pets. I learned to walk with Misty. She’d lie down next to me, I’d hold on tight, we’d wobble for a few steps, I’d fall and we’d try again. One of my earliest memories is Pup asking me for my toast (we all know how they ask) and I gave it to him. My mum told me off but looking back I see that I didn’t really see much difference between him asking me for my toast or a human asking.
I grew up very close to our dogs and I can read them better than most people seem to. I can never understand why other people don’t understand what they are trying to say because seems obvious. Ears, tail, sounds, everything: they’re communicating. But apparently people get it wrong all the time. So I suppose I learned that from a very young age and many other people didn’t. And surely many other people also did learn to talk to pets from a young age.
Of course, the communication is imperfect and it happens that I realise they’re trying to tell me something but I don’t know what. Same for them, when I’m training my current dog, Ymke, she has a very clear way of saying to me: “I don’t understand what you want from me, make it clearer!” - sort of a hop on either paw, cocked head and then a disgruntled gurgle-whine.
Dogs work very hard to tailor their communication to us, to help us understand. Barking is mostly a thing they do for humans because we’re eejits and we seem deaf to them, so they make it super obvious for us. My grandmother’s lab, Ebby, made kissy sounds in response to our kissy sounds because she realised it was meant to symbolise love. She didn’t get the sound exactly right - she had to suck between her teeth - but it was close and the intention was clear. Well, it was after a while. The first few times I wondered if she had something stuck in her mouth, because I am a human and I’m an idiot :smack: 
In the vast majority of cases, your pets and children are totally different species.