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Empirical Kanzi: the ape language controversy revisited.

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INNOVATIVE SCIENCE DEPENDS UPON A potentially volatile mixture of highly creative work and realistic skepticism. In a recent issue of SKEPTIC (Vol. 13, No. 4, "Aping Language: A Skeptical Analysis of the Evidence for Nonhuman Primate Language"), University of Florida psychologist Clive Wynn likened the potential import of the discovery that the chimpanzee named Washoe had learned to produce simple linguistic utterances to humans landing on the moon. If Wynn is correct regarding the importance of ape language research, all truly innovative reports in this field will merit considerable scrutiny, scholarly debate, and informed critique. It is, therefore, not surprising that reports of "talking apes" have been subjected to a level of criticism beyond that of other claims. Such strongly negative reactions stem from the fact that, if the reports are true, their implications are threatening to the long-held anthropocentric conceit of uniqueness for our species based on our language ability.

Science has traditionally viewed human achievements as something peculiar, even accidental, by evolutionary standards, Our societies and our ways of life are said to be completely dependent upon, and mostly determined by, language. If apes are capable of language, it means that we must radically revise our views of who we are and of how we have achieved our current technologically advanced lifestyles. None of these changes will be easy. Much of the Western canon and many of our scholarly disciplines are built upon the assumption that humans and humans alone have language.

A Brief History of Ape Language Research: The Initial Three Chimpanzees

The initial repots that Washoe--a chimpanzee trained by Beatrice and Alien Gardner--was acquiring human sign language were soon followed by news that a second chimpanzee named Sarah (trained by David Premack) was employing magnetic pieces of plastic as "words." Then came reports that a third chimpanzee named Lana (trained by Duane Rumbaugh) was using geometric symbols on a computer-based keyboard to produce multi-word sentences. Washoe generalized her signs to new objects and made spontaneous sign combinations. Sarah answered questions about language (such as, Name of this apple?), even though she had no language she could employ for the purpose of communication. She was said to able to look at plastic symbols (once they had become associatively paired with objects through training) and solve linguistically based analogies such as those shown in Figure 1.

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Meanwhile, Lana was acquiring not only words, but complete "stock sentences" with embedded grammatical rules, such as "Please machine give piece-of bread." Although Lana's "stock sentences" were purposefully trained, she also employed novel structures that were grammatically based, in order to get food items and to control the behavior of humans, such as "Question you give banana which-is black"to indicate she preferred overly ripe bananas to yellow ones. (1)

The reports of other chimpanzees that confirmed the Gardners' findings with Washoe (albeit with different methods) riveted the scientific community. But the widespread fascination with the complementarity of these findings was compromised when disputes erupted between the three original investigators. The initial debates swirled around attempts to determine whether mindless conditioning was producing something that looked like language, or whether the apes were transcending their training and achieving some awareness of the power of words. (2) Linguists, in the meantime, were trying to determine whether or not Washoe's utterances evidenced a primitive grammar. This effort collapsed, however, when they learned that the Gardners had not actually recorded the true order of Washoe's signs, because they had focused on what Washoe said rather than how she said it. Linguists consequently--and quite naturally--were skeptical.

Nim Chimpsky and Noam Chomsky: The Dark Days of Ape Language

Things became more complicated when Herbert Terrace, a committed behavioral psychologist and learning expert, stepped forward with the stated goal of saving the field by training an ape properly to answer the famed linguist Noam Chomsky, who quipped that if man had been intended to fly he would have been born with wings and if apes had been intended to speak they would have been born with language. For Terrace, this meant employing sophisticated conditioning techniques that he thought were absent from the work of his predecessors and beginning the human socialization of a chimpanzee at birth, instead of a couple of years later. Terrace placed his ape subject, Nim Chimpsky, in the home of a friend with seven children. While this provided a truly human social world for Nim, it did not provide Nim with exposure to sign language. Instead, Nim was exposed to sign language in a training cubicle at Columbia University.

When Nim was four years old, Terrace fired a cannonball at the field of ape language when he announced that he had been fooled by his chimpanzee subject. Although he had originally thought that young Nim was actually communicating with him, Terrace now claimed that detailed study of videotapes revealed that Nim had been imitating his teachers. Using the Gardners' footage, Terrace illustrated how, in a number of scenes, Washoe's teachers produced signs that were showy thereafter imitated by Washoe. Often this took the form of a question and answer dialogue, for example, Teacher: "Do you want me to open the refrigerator?" Washoe: "Open, open, refrigerator hurry."

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Terrace concluded that Washoe's sign combinations, like Nim's, were imitations of the teachers' preceding utterances plus some "wild card" signs that were always appropriate,...

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