Displacement — the rewarded difference
Learn this one. The rewarded difference is displacement — communicating about things not present: the past, the future, elsewhere. Humans do it constantly; animal signals stay in the here and now — food, a predator, territory. The full-mark line uses a connective: humans have displacement, whereas animal signals are limited to the present. Nuance: the honeybee waggle dance is a limited displacement in space, never in time.
Aitchison: shared vs human-only criteria
Aitchison (1983) listed criteria for whether a system is a language; the split answers similarities and differences. Shared by animals too: sound signals, arbitrariness (signal unlike its referent), the need for learning. Human-only: displacement (past and future), creativity (unlimited new messages), duality (sounds build words build sentences) and structure dependence (word order changes meaning: dog bit man vs man bit dog).
Animal communication really is communication
Bullet b wants similarities too, and answers lose them by treating animal signals as nothing. Animal communication carries meaning (vervet alarm calls differ by predator), is often arbitrary, often learned, and often non-verbal (a play bow, grooming). Never write that only humans use non-verbal communication — it is marked wrong. The similarity is the existence and function of signals; the difference is what the system can do.
Drawn from real examiner reports.
Only humans use body language (wrong)
Asked for a difference, candidates write that humans have body language and animals do not. It is marked wrong: animal communication is full of non-verbal signalling — a play bow, grooming. It is a similarity, not a difference; reach instead for a criterion animals lack — displacement, creativity or structure dependence.
The digest records candidates wrongly claiming non-verbal communication as uniquely human; animals can use it (June 2023 P2 Q37).
Email and texting are not language features
Examiners record email and texting offered as features of human communication; they earn nothing. A feature is a property of the system, not the medium it travels through — the words in an email already had displacement and creativity before email existed. And if a question says state one feature, name it rather than define the term.
The digest records email and texting as non-creditworthy features (June 2019 P2 Q38), and defining a term when asked to state one feature (June 2023 P1 Q6).
Swapping the four human-only criteria
The four human-only criteria are confused; a wrong definition scores nothing. Displacement = time and place, not new sentences. Creativity = unlimited new messages, not vocabulary size. Duality = the two-level build (sounds, words, sentences), not grammar. Structure dependence = meaning changing when the same words are re-ordered.
The digest records confusion between closely related terms keeping responses out of Level 3 (June 2024 P2 Q41), and that a two-mark describe needs two unique points (June 2023 P2 Q22).
Describing a study without linking back
Level 3 was rare partly because answers describe a study — the vervet calls, the bee dance — accurately, then stop, never saying what it shows about the criteria. Description is AO1; it becomes AO3 only when turned into an argument. Add a so-line: the bee dance signals food some way off, so it is a limited displacement in space but never about past or future.
The digest records description of studies without linking back keeping responses out of Level 3 (June 2024 P2 Q41).
A pet obeying a command is not language
A dog that sits when told has learned to associate a sound with an outcome — communication, not language: no structure dependence, no creativity, no displacement, no duality. The mirror error is as costly — treating animal signals as meaningless noise, when vervet alarm calls carry real information. Communication is not language.
Bees do not have full displacement
Over-correcting the nuance: because the honeybee waggle dance points to a distant food source, candidates claim bees have displacement. Only in a limited form, and only in space — the dance refers to something not physically present, but never to the past or the future, and it is a fixed inherited signal with no creativity, duality or structure dependence.
Reaching 7-9 on the 9-mark Assess
The 9-mark Assess splits evenly across AO1, AO2 and AO3. Balance here means similarities and differences, not only what animals cannot do. Name Aitchison's criteria, apply them, argue both sides, and judge whether the difference is one of degree or kind.
Two points, a connective, an explanation
Describe (2): two unique points — one reworded scores once. Difference (2): add a connective (whereas) — two side-by-side definitions stay implicit and cap at one mark. Explain: a point plus what follows, e.g. no displacement, so past events cannot be signalled.
Tie a named criterion to a scenario detail
On an animal scenario, marks come from attaching a named criterion to a described detail — not naming the animal, repeating the stem, or copying a line. Apply first: AO3 cannot be awarded without AO2, so an evaluation on a generic answer scores nothing.
Animals clearly communicate. A monkey warns the troop, a bee tells the hive where the food is, a dog invites another dog to play. So the question is not do animals communicate — they do. The question is whether animal communication counts as language.
Communication is not the same thing as language. Communication is sending a signal that changes another individual's behaviour. Language is a communication system that meets a particular set of criteria. Hold that distinction and this whole statement falls into place.
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