Sequence, syntax, and semantics : responses of a language-trained Sea Lion (Zalophus californianus) to novel sign combinations

We present a sea lion's (Zalophus californianus) responses to anomalous (unfamiliar) combinations of signs created by reordering, deleting, or adding signs. The sea lion's responses to these anomalous combinations demosntrated that she had learned a number of syntactic relations from exposure to a limited set of standard combinatorial forms. The learned syntactic relations included two types of conditional relations, (a) sequential conditional relations between sign classes and (b) hierarchical conditional relations between subsets of signs within a combination

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