And I think to have some evidence that a little part of this individual language persists during a lifetime. You are right to point to the richness of traditional interaction. Language learning is individual only in the sense that every newly born has to repeat the adoption of the tradition entrenched in our social world. What startles me is, how a young child can adopt the whole rich tradition that contains more and more and more complicated features - generally parts of tradition have to be omitted so the common social language itself is changing. The reference is not fixed by particular observable features.
Cats are, by nature, organisms.
I think this view underestimated pattern matching as means of recognition.