e intentional communication characteristics, as their behaviors have shown in captivity. For example, dolphins have been observed to squirt or splash water at strangers who come near their tank. After squirting the water the dolphin will raise itself out of the water to curiously observe what effect their behavior had on the stranger. Although this behavior is not communitive, nonetheless, it seems to suggest that the dolphin is aware of the effect of its behavior on others, showing that it has the cognitive ability for intentional communication (Erickson, 1993). Communication between humans and dolphins occurs mostly through a gestural language that borrows some words from American Sign Language. The trainers make the gestures with big arm movements, asking the animal to follow commands such as person left Frisbee fetch, which means bring the Frisbee on the left to the person in the pool. In one study, two bottlenosed dolphins were tested in proficiency in interpreting gestural language signs and compared against humans who viewed the same videos of veridical and degraded gestures. The dolphins were found to recognize gestures as accurately as fluent humans, and the results suggested that the dolphins had constructed an interconnected network of semantic and gestural representations in their memory (Herman, Morrel-Samuels, & Pack, 1990). Such requests probe the dolphins understanding of word order and test the animals grammatical competence. It has also been determined that dolphins can form a generalized concept about an object: they respond correctly to commands involving a hoop, no matter whether the hoop is round, octagonal, or square. The animals seem to have a conceptual grasp of the words they learn, showing an understanding of the core attributes of human language, those being semantics and syntax (Erickson, 1993). Though this information seems compelling for dolphin language abilities, to determine whether or not they are capa...
