International Journal of Comparative Psychology

In

the last decades, putative nonhuman linguistic skills have been proposed as an essential trait to better understand animal mind and communication, and the evolution of human language. This paper offers a critique of Animal Language Research (ALR) to date and posits that the methodological and interpretative problems of ALR derive from some key theoretical paradoxes implicit in the premises of the research Based on evolutionary and continuity arguments, ALR has assumed that nonhuman animals may posses some "rudiments" of human language. In contrast, it is argued that (a) the evolutionary origins of human language do not necessarily require the presence of linguistic capacities in nonhumans;. (b) animal communicative skills could be best understood through the study of their behavioral natural repertoire; and (c) the performance of animals in language studies can be an indicator of their cognitive abilities but not of their linguistic competence.