Why not try corvids first? They’re readily available in most places, and easy to work with, especially when the other options are elephants, great apes, cephalopods, and cetaceans.
Sure, they’re not gonna be superhumanly intelligent, but as a demonstration of transpecific communication capability, they strike me as a great initial target.
Thanks for the suggestion, though I don’t think they are smart enough to get far with grammar. No non-cetaceans non-humans seem to be.
One possibility is to try it with bottlenose dolphins (or beluga whales). (Bottlenose dolphins have shown greater capacity to learn grammar than great apes.[1]) Those are likely easier to get research access to than orcas. I think we might get some proof of concept of the methodology there, though I’m relatively pessimistic about them learning a full language well.
Why not try corvids first? They’re readily available in most places, and easy to work with, especially when the other options are elephants, great apes, cephalopods, and cetaceans.
Sure, they’re not gonna be superhumanly intelligent, but as a demonstration of transpecific communication capability, they strike me as a great initial target.
Thanks for the suggestion, though I don’t think they are smart enough to get far with grammar. No non-cetaceans non-humans seem to be.
One possibility is to try it with bottlenose dolphins (or beluga whales). (Bottlenose dolphins have shown greater capacity to learn grammar than great apes.[1]) Those are likely easier to get research access to than orcas. I think we might get some proof of concept of the methodology there, though I’m relatively pessimistic about them learning a full language well.
See the work of Louis Herman in the 80s (and 90s)