Question

What is the difference between animal and human communication?

Answer 1

Human
Animal
Duality of Patterning
Distinctive sounds, called phonemes, are arbitrary and have no meaning. But humans can string these sounds in an infinite number of ways to create meaning via words and sentences.
Other animals do not communicate by arranging arbitrary sounds, which limits the number of messages they can create.
Creativity
New words can be invented easily.
Animals have to evolve in order for their signs to change.
Displacement
Humans can talk about remote, abstract, or imaginary things that aren't happening in their immediate environments.
Animal communication is context driven—they react to stimuli, or indexes.
Interchangeability
Any gender of human can use the same languages.
Certain animal communications in the animal world can only be used by one gender of that animal.
Cultural Transmission
Humans acquire language culturally—words must be learned.
The way that animals communicate are biological, or inborn.
Arbitrariness
Human language is symbolic, using a set number of sounds (phonemes) and characters (alphabet), which allows ideas to be recorded and preserved.
Animal communication is not symbolic, so it cannot preserve ideas of the past.
Biology
On a purely biological level, the human voice box and tongue are very unique, and are required to make the sounds we recognize as language.
Other animals have different biological structures, which impact they way they make sounds.
Ambiguity
A word, or sign, can have several meanings.
Every sign has only one meaning.
Variety
Human language can arrange words into an infinite number of ideas, sometimes referred to as discrete infinity.
Animals only have a limited number of combinations they can use to communicate.