Apes and Language
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Apes and Language:
A Review of the Literature
By Karen Shaw
For Professor Dyers Class
March 2, 2005
Over the past 30 years researchers have demonstrated that the great apes (chimpanzees gorillas and orangutans) resemble humans in language abilities more than had been thought possible. Just how far that resemblance extends however has been a matter of some controversy. Researchers agree that the apes have acquired fairly large vocabularies in American Sign Language and in artificial languages but they have drawn quite different conclusions in addressing the following questions:
1. How spontaneously have apes used language?
2. How creatively have apes used language?
3. Can apes create sentences?
4. What are the implications of the ape language studies?
This review of the literature on apes and language focuses on these four questions.
How Spontaneously Have Apes Used Language?
In an influential article Terrace, Petitto, Sanders, and Bever (1979) argued that the apes in language experiments were not using language spontaneously, but were merely imitating their trainers, responding to conscious or unconscious cues. Terrace and his colleagues at Columbia University had trained a chimpanzee, Nim, in American Sign Language, so their skepticism about the apes abilities received much attention. In fact funding for ape language research was sharply reduced following publication of their 1979 article “Can an Ape Create a Sentence?”
In retrospect the conclusions of Terrace et al. seem to have been premature. Although some early ape language studies had not been rigorously controlled to eliminate cuing even as early as the 1970s R. A. Gardner and B. T. Gardner were conducting double-blind experiments that prevented any possibility of cuing (Fouts, 1997, p. 99). Since 1979, researchers have diligently guarded against cuing. Perhaps the best evidence that apes are not merely responding to cues is that they have signed to one another spontaneously, without trainers present. Like many of the apes studied, gorillas Koko and Michael have been observed signing to one another (Patterson & Linden, 1981). At Central Washington University the baby chimpanzee Loulis placed in the care of the signing chimpanzee Washoe, mastered nearly fifty signs in American Sign Language without help from humans.
“Interestingly,” wrote researcher Fouts (1997), “Loulis did not pick up any of the seven signs that we [humans] used around him. He learned only from Washoe and [another chimp] Ally” (p. 244). The extent to which chimpanzees spontaneously use language may depend on their training. Terrace trained Nim using the behaviorist technique of operant conditioning, so it is not surprising that many of Nims signs were cued. Many other researchers have used a conversational approach that parallels the process by which human children acquire language. In an experimental study, OSullivan and Yeager (1989) contrasted the two techniques, using Terraces Nim as their subject. They found that Nims use of language was significantly more spontaneous under conversational conditions.
How Creatively Have Apes Used Language?
There is considerable evidence that apes have invented creative names. One of the earliest and most controversial examples involved the Gardners chimpanzee Washoe. Washoe, who knew signs for “water” and “bird,” once signed “water bird” when in the presence of a swan. Terrace et al. (1979) suggested that there was “no basis for concluding that Washoe was characterizing the swan as a bird that inhabits water. ” Washoe may simply have been “identifying correctly a body of water and a bird, in that order” (p. 895).
Other examples are not so easily explained away. The bonobo Kanzi has requested particular films by combining symbols on a computer in a creative way. For instance, to ask for Quest for Fire, a film about early primates discovering fire, Kanzi began to use symbols for “campfire” and “TV” (Eckholm, 1985). The gorilla Koko, who learned American Sign Language, has a long list of creative names to her credit: “elephant baby” to describe a Pinoc-chio doll, “finger bracelet” to describe a ring, “bottle match” to describe a cigarette lighter, and so on (Patterson & Linden, 1981, p. 146). If Terraces analysis of the “water bird” example is applied to the examples just mentioned, it does not hold. Surely Koko did not first see an elephant and then a baby before signing “elephant baby”–or a bottle and a match before signing “bottle match.”
Can Apes Create Sentences?
The early ape language studies offered little proof that apes could combine symbols into grammatically ordered sentences. Apes strung together various signs, but the sequences were often random and repetitious. Nims series of sixteen signs is a case in point: “give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you” (Terrace et al., 1979, p. 895).
More recent studies with bonobos at the Language Research Center in Atlanta have broken new ground. Kanzi, a bonobo trained by Savage-Rumbaugh, seems to understand simple grammatical rules about word order. For instance, Kanzi learned that in two- word utterances action precedes object, an ordering also used by human children at the two-word stage. In a major article reporting on their research, Greenfield and Savage-Rumbaugh (1990) wrote that Kanzi rarely “repeated himself or formed combinations that were semantically unrelated” (p. 556).
More important, Kanzi began on his own to create certain patterns that may not exist in English but can be found among deaf children and in other human languages. For example, Kanzi used his own rules when combining action symbols. Symbols that involved an invitation to play, such as “chase,” would appear first; symbols that indicated what was to be done during
play (“hide”) would appear second. Kanzi also created his own rules when combining gestures and symbols. He would use the symbol first and then gesture, a practice often followed by
young deaf children (Greenfield