Notes - L&C VI Carmel, animal language

why sound? goes round corners and through things (anything except a vacuum) including water, can be modulated rapidly + variously, can be heard at night, does not leave a trace, works over long distances

can vary the frequency (blackbirds), the amplitude or the temporal patterning

vocal animals blow air through an appendage or across a membrane

instrumentalists rub (appendages) or beat (what they�re standing on)

e.g. the mole cricket Gryllotalpa Vinaea builds a twin-megaphone burrow to amplify its noise to 90dB (from a metre away), despite being only 5cm long

sound communication probably evolved from non-signal movements which served a different purpose. the change to a communication function = called ritualisation

trilobites 500m years ago may have been the first to use their hard exoskeletons as sound-making equipment

Humpback whales

the worldwide population of humpback whales has gone down by 95% since the turn of the 20^th century

Roger + Katy Payne built up a sound library of 20 years of whales at Bermuda

realised that the humpback whales in a given breeding area (and all the others they mingle with) sing the same constantly-evolving song (which the Paynes see in themes, phrases + units)

whales have the largest brains of an animal ever

tempting to think that they are wise and have complex mental lives, but are constrained by their environment (i.e. their ability to manipulate it, e.g. through tool use)

it could just be that their brains are because of the difficulties of the acoustic processing necessary to hear the song as produced under water

although bat brains are less than a gram

they may dance in time, and the song may be related to courtship

they sing alone, hundreds of miles apart

when a mother and calf are together, an escort swims to join them

when an escort got in between mother + calf in a threatening situation, the mother gave it a half minute series of grunts � Tyack

aggressive activity between 2 escort males � variety of slaps, bubbles, vocal social-sounding calls, song segments, trumpeting and grunts � up to 15 other whales stream to join, trying to jostle the principal escort

eventually they drop away and lose interest and start singing again

when Tyack and the US Navy used playback calls of the social calls, the singing whales would home in on the loudspeaker at up to 12km/hr

the song could be a spacing mechanism for courting males?

Southern right whales

Peninsula Valdes in Patagonia � very windy/stormy bays

the Southern right whales use flipper-slapping on the surface when the low frequencies are masked by the storm

Christopher and Jane Clark (Rockefeller Uni) observed:

in the bay, low-frequency tonal calls for long-distance (100-300Hz = the quietest frequency in the bay) � cease the calls when they meet up

they use higher frequency when excited or in tight active groups

aggressive growling between males

when there is 1 male/1 female, they use higher melodic notes

no alarm calls, despite the killer whales

this is not complex communication, because they are grazers, not hunters, and don�t require group coordination (as dolphins do). moreover, they are promiscuous rather than monogamous, so they require fewer social calls.

respond only to southern right whale playback (not humpback/synthesised tones) � would head straight for the loudspeaker immediately, making sounds themselves

Scattered herds

mysterious 20Hz blips, very pure and loud

� in late afternoon, �� at midnight

15 mins trains of pulses, then 2� min silences = breathing pattern of large slow-swimming whale

Schevill identified as a fin whale (2nd largest animal ever)

baleen whales travel alone or in bands of less than 20 � perhaps in very very scattered herds

these sounds may be used to locate each other

do not breed in the same area

Patterson and Hamilton (off Bermuda) noticed 1 whale change course towards another on hearing it make this noise

20Hz signal = lower freq than the noise of turbulent storms

loses little energy bouncing off sea bottom

best freq for propagating through surface-frozen polar sea

4 pounds of dynamite exploded off Australia was detected 12000 miles away at Bermuda

Payne and Webb calculate that they could use deep water sound channels to focus the sound

without: 50 miles. with: 500 miles.

before the steamship. without: 140 miles. with: 3500

fin and humpback whales have more ear-brain fibres than man/dolphin, lack the high-freq hearing, but maybe hear infrasonic

Other whales

Californian gray whale + sperm whale (odontocete = toothed) use clicks (probably for navigating and locating food)

distinctive pattern of clicks � identify individuals

sounds almost like a morse code

gregarious sperm whales: clicks may be imoprtant in a complex social structure

whales noticed distress/alarm calls

Dolphins

Odontocetes = killer whales, pilot + sperm, dolphins, porpoises

dolphin neocortex = 98% of dolphin cortex (but it is thinner than man�s)

vs 96% for man and 69% for kangaroo

John Lilly � dolphin doyen

tried to get them to mimic English � they could �follow a count up to ten� and almost say simple English words, but still worse than mynah birds and budgerigars

however, the dolphins learned almost instanteously, not like budgies

JANUS (Joint Analog Numeric Understanding System) in California = an attepmt to marry computer-assisted/generated dolphin sounds with visual symbols

48 sound/symbol combinations, (morphemes) associated wa n object/place/action. the computer interfaces our different acoustic ranges and delivery speeds.

Flipper Sea School � using whistle language, similar to sheep dogs

Hemen, Wolz and Richards � 2 female bottlenose dolphins

responded to visual + verbal signals like a sheepdog, but talk back

dolphin has a good auditory memory (can remember long lists of sounds)

used the technique of 2nd-language teachers of getting your to perform tasks, so the level of understanding is indicated by the level of performance of task

is not really probing linguistic ability, more behaviour

famous experiment James Bastion (1965)

2 dolphins screened but within earshot � female taught to push paddle for food, male learned (presumably with the aid of the noises the female was making) to do the same

dolphins in the wild seem to communicate, avoid similar-shaped boats the week after a dolphin was killed, but many still die by Japanese tuna fishermen or get beached

very varied vocal repertoire � squawks, whistles, squeaks, blips, groans, clicks, barks, rattles, chirps and moans = pulsed + unpulsed

many pulsed clicks = for navigation/echolocation

also heard pulsed yelps during courtship, squeaks during training in captivity, frightened/alarmed squeaks, aggressive buzzes

smaller groups appear to use pulsed sounds, whereas Hawaiian spinner and bottlenose dolphins form huge schools and whistle (high-frequency doesn�t travel as far in water so whistles are better for larger grps)

attempts to give emotional meanings (abrupt, loud, non-vocal jaw-clapping or tail-slapping), intimate chuckling during caressing, signature whistles

1974 Russia: 2 bottlenoses, couldn�t see each other, seemed to have an opening identity section followed by more complex clicks � the message � there are parallels to birdsong (+ TCP/IP???)

tropical spotted male was caught, continuous bouts of whistling (alarm/distress) � when these were played back to this school, they fled instantly, yet a different school showed only curiosity � dolphins have local dialects, like killer whales

Killer whales

Dolphinarium, Hardejik???, Netherlands � Van Heel and Gudren the killer whale learnt to touch a certain object associated with a specific sound, then added action words + verbs to create new combinations

apparently Gudren began to give the signals back

Fisher and Ford: sounds of killer whale pods are very stable

they use about 12 distinct stereotyped calls when spread over a couple of miles

difficult to link sounds with particular meaning/behaviour � possibly position, ID, emotional/activity state + pod identity

pods don�t change/mingle very much, usually groups of less than 50

Hawaiian spinner dolphins

distinctive twisting leap

Norris and Brownley � studying structure and social behaviour of schools in the wild in the Pacific

they are predictable and do everything together

different sounds and patterns during the day, swim slowly and close making a few clicks usually

as excitement � during socialising in the afternoon,� zig zag swimming, higher freq sounds (whistles and burst-pulses) (ID + state, possibly?)

then � whistles + � burst pulses, � surface activity, play loudly

it�s all building up to them leaving as a fired-up unit (like the cape hunting dogs in Africa)

it is less clear with spinner dolphins than with other types whether any one/group is dominant

chorusing in unison may be an indication of readiness to hunt

after the frenzied noise and activity of the afternoon, they use clicks for navigation and hunting at sea

whistling associated with feeding, most early in the day and least at night (low activity for bottlenoses)

after a year in captivity, a dolphin�s whistling becomes synchronised with feeding and training routines

when very excited they either whistle or become very quiet

dolphins may use a graded system of vocalisations, with each sound overlapping to form a series of sounds rather than discrete units

pulsed sound � mainly in echolocation/navigation � autocommunication

can locate objects, discern movement and densities, whether alive, and stun with a high-intensity beam

Norris � blindfolded a dolphin (with difficulty) � found that it could stil dodge obstacles and pick up food, despite having no sense of smell

can decode 700 units of sound/second to differentiate between a copper and aluminium plate of the same colour, and whether solid or hollow

Berin noticed congenital-seeming deformities in sperm whale jaws that would stop them being able to catch prey, yet they were still well-fed on a squid a day, despite them being faster swimming � concluded that they must be using sound to stun/debilitate their prey

need for echolocation mannres to avoid angering other dolphins � 3 dolphins in a tank, always turn off their echolocation and turn away when another dolphin crosses in front

Indris and Howler monkeys

Notes � Gross

pg 671

Notes �web articles on bird intelligence, BBC Wildlife

Misc

could birds be as intelligent as chimps or bonobos?

bird brains are large in relation to body mass. bird brains are 6-11 times larger than like-sized reptiles. some bird brains are up to 9% of body mass, a similar proportion to higher mammals

tool use is as common in birds as in primates (e.g. leaves, stones and twigs), e.g. Egyptian vultures, New Caledonian crows and bowerbirds

learning by watching - among a troop of Japanese macaques, an individual learned to wash sweet potatoes, and within nine years, most of the troop had acquired the same behaviour. The stealing of cream from the top of milk bottles by British blue and great tits was first observed in the 1920s. Within 30 years, the learned behaviour had spread throughout virtually the entire country.

learning to communicate � Irene Pepperbreg and Alex (African grey parrot) matched the performance of chimpanzees in almost every respect. and birdsong may give them a great advantage over other animals, with its complex vocalisations as an advanced vehicle for communication

however, we can�t communicate with them in a full human language because most birds can�t manage to produce human speech or ASL

Kea

Kea = alpine parrots, only found in the high country of New Zealand�s South island. harsh mountain environment, food is hard to get, requires ingenious and flexible behaviour.

dark, olive-green olive-green plumage, heavy bodies and long bills tucked back into stubby necks. glorious splash of extravagant orangey red on the underside of the wings. bold and cheeky

intelligence test � food reward for pulling a string, standing on the string to stop the food falling back again and repeating this action several times, with a camera pointing at them close by

they took 3 mins, not 4 days � different bird species (tits, pigeons, crows, even woodpeckers) took days or months

the BBC has filmed rooks discovering an ingenious way of breaking open walnuts, ravens solving four-stage intelligence tests, pigeons distinguishing between different colours to get a food reward

Notes � Dave Switzer, web article, �Language in Apes�

Various aspects of language (Wallman, 1992):

grammar

symbol usage

ability to represent real-world situations

ability to articulate something new

History of the apes & language question

1661 Pepys wrote of a �baboone� that "I do believe it already understands much English; and I am of the mind it might be taught to speak or make signs" (Wallman 1992)

1920s Yerkes concluded that chimpanzees could not learn speech, but might be able to learn sign language

Keith & Cathy Hayes taught Viki the chimp 4 words (Gardner & Gardner, 1989)

various experiments raising chimps like children in a family speaking ASL

Why apes can�t speak

they lack the intelligence (Yerkes)

they only vocalise in the wild when greatly excited (Gardner, Gardner & Drumm, 1989)

they don�t usually mimic sounds (Rumbaugh, 1977)

their vocal chords aren�t designed for it (de Luce & Wilder, 1983)

reports of the complexity and intentionality of chimpanzee communication in the wild have not yet had the recognition they deserve (Savage-Rumbaugh 1986), e.g. vervets have the most sophisticated animal communication that we know of; the sounds they use are learned, not instictive (Diamond 1993)

Sarah

In the year after Project Washoe began, David Premack started an experiment with a different kind of language. The above-mentioned plastic tokens are those which Premack used to train a chimpanzee named Sarah. These tokens represented words, and varied in shape, size, texture, and colour. Sentences were formed by placing the tokens in a vertical line (an orientation which Sarah favoured). This language differs from sign language in that "the permanence of the sentence not only makes it possible to study language without a memory problem, but to study memory in the context of language by regulating the duration for which the sentence remains on the board" (D. Premack 1979: 233). Sarah was taught nouns, verbs, adjectives, pronouns, and quantifiers; she was also taught same-difference, negation, and compound sentences. The earliest words named "various interesting fruits, so that Sarah ... could both solve her problem and eat it" (A. Premack 1976: 79). Sarah exhibited displacement, the ability to think of something (in the following case, chocolate) when it is not immediately present. Presented with the sentence "Brown color of chocolate" without any chocolate present, and later presented with "Take brown," Sarah took a brown object (A. Premack 1976: 89). When a trainer put a question on Sarah's board and walked away, Sarah showed little interest in answering it--"in somewhat the way a conversation falters when one person ceases to pay attention to the other" (D. Premack 1971: 821). To show that Sarah was not merely responding to cues from her human trainers, she was adapted to a new trainer that did not know her language. When this trainer presented her with questions, she gave the correct answers less frequently than usual, but still well above chance. Ann Premack remarked that "it would be interesting to see how well a child at this language stage of about 150 words would do in a simple language test with a virtual stranger" (A. Premack 1976: 103). To test Sarah's view of words, Premack presented her with an apple and a set of features (for example, round vs. square and red vs. green). Then she was presented with her word for apple, and the same set of features. She choose the correct features for both the real apple and her word for apple, a light-blue plastic triangle (A. Premack 1976: 104). This demonstrates Hockett's property of arbitrariness; the symbol for apple is arbitrary (that is, there is no similarity between an apple and a light-blue plastic triangle).

Other Ape Language Experiments: Sherman & Austin, Chantek, Kanzi, Koko

Many other ape language experiments were done other than the four described above; I will briefly list several of these. Sherman and Austin were two chimpanzees who were able to communicate specific information to each other through the use of symbols, information that they could not communicate without the symbols (Savage-Rumbaugh, Rumbaugh & Boysen: 1978). Chantek, an orangutan, learned about 150 different signs, and used them spontaneously and without undue repetition. Chantek internalized a minimal value system, using signs for GOOD and BAD in appropriate contexts (Miles 1993: 47, 52). A bonobo named Kanzi learned at a faster rate than the chimpanzees; he learned his first words by merely watching lessons directed at his mother. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh describes Kanzi as "the ape at the brink of the human mind" in her book of that title. John Mitani summarizes the book in his review. Savage-Rumbaugh asserts that Kanzi uses sentences; that is, he follows structured rules in his multi-word utterances (showing the property of duality). He even makes up his own rules, such as first using a lexigram to specify an action and then using a gesture to specify an agent (Savage-Rumbaugh & Lewin: 1994: 161). Francine Patterson has been raising Koko, a gorilla, since 1972 and teaching her sign language. Koko has learned a greater vocabulary than Nim, uses more words per utterance on average, and "a great deal of creativity, spontaneity, and structure characterize her utterances" (Patterson & Linden 1981:116). Koko also rhymes and jokes; on one occasion she used a metaphor of an elephant to refer to herself when she pretended a long tube was her "trunk" (Patterson & Linden 1981: 143). These characteristics of Koko's utterances show the property of productivity, in which a speaker says something never heard or said before and is understood by the audience. (It is interesting how one automatically uses the language of speech when describing any form of language use, including those which are not spoken. Many of my sources also exhibit this trait.) The Nova program Can Chimps Talk? did a good job of exploring the various experiments and issues involved in ape language.

Notes � on Hockett�s Linguistic Universals

A more elaborate way of defining language was proposed by Charles F. Hockett, a contemporary of Chomsky's who was "unceremoniously eclipsed" by Chomsky "sprang[ing] to fame" after the introduction of his transformational model of grammar (Seuren 1998:215). Some of his thirteen criteria (Crystal 1997:400-401) relate directly to spoken communication. The only ability resembling speech is the ability to use vocalizations which do, of course, entail an auditory-vocal channel with broadcast transmission and directional reception of discrete, contrasting sounds (discreteness, cp. supra on vervet calls) and rapid fading � i.e. transitoriness of auditory signals (cp. Hockett's application of his features to gibbon calls in Crystal 1997:401 after Hockett 1960:10-11). Incidentally, the signs of sign language are equally transitory. Hockett even sees total feedback in gibbon calls (and hence, in ape vocalizations), as they allow for "speakers [to] hear and [�] reflect upon everything that they 'say' " (Crystal 1997:401; added quotation marks ours).

Hockett called the ability to send and receive messages �interchangeability�. It is clear that all the primates used in recent research projects were able to both understand the signs of their caretakers and send out signs (whether using ASL or lexigrams and gestures). A number of apes also displayed the ability to sign or communicate not only when addressed; they would spontaneously report or ask something to their caretakers. This demonstrates once more the feature of total feedback: the primates can reflect upon everything they communicate. Chantek, for instance, showed an ability to rephrase or improve the articulation of a sign. In addition, the only function of the signs is to convey meaning, they do not have a biological or any other function other than signalling a meaning; Hockett calls this specialization.

The lexigrams which Savage-Rumbaugh�s subjects used to communicate demonstrate that the non-human primate language shows a high degree of arbitrariness, which is another key feature in Hockett�s description of language. The geometrical symbols on the keyboard, which were used to denote words like e.g. banana or toilet, show no resemblance to the actual concept referred to. It will also be remembered that Kanzi's invented rule for combining gestures with lexigrams is entirely arbitrary (in the sense of 'not functionally motivated'). Furthermore, the symbols "convey meaning through their stable association with realworld situations" (ibid.); they show a degree of semanticity.

Displacement, or the ability to talk about phenomena that are absent, is one of Hockett�s most important criteria; especially deception is rated as the ultimate achievement of discourse ability. Both Koko and Chantek displayed a kind of �Machiavellian intelligence� and even their caretakers estimated that the apes lied an average of three times per week. Furthermore, Chantek often signed about things or places that were not present at the time and Patterson recorded numerous instances where Koko signed about past events. Similar (and more extensively documented) remarks clearly hold for Kanzi and other apes at the Language Research Center.

Another important characteristic of language is said to be the productivity of its users. As mentioned above, Kanzi's "language" meets this requirement. In addition, some primates showed that they were able to express a new concept, for which they had not yet learned a word, by using old elements of their 'language'. Koko famously called a mask an �eye-hat�, whereas Chantek called contact lens solution �eye drink�. This proves that the primates did not use their signs in a limited or fixed way.

Loulis, a chimpanzee who did not really respond to the training she underwent, showed yet another important property of language. Whilst prolonged training proved unsuccessful, she did manage to pick up over 50 signs spontaneously from other signing chimpanzees. Hockett called this traditional transmission, or the ability to learn language from the other language users. Similarly, Kanzi appears to have learned at least one symbol from another ape (viz. Austin): the motorically quite demanding handclapping gesture signifying "chase" (Savage-Rumbaugh et al. 1998:35-36).

Displacement, productivity and traditional transmission were not to be found in gibbon calls, according to Hockett, nor was his final criterion of duality of patterning: "The sounds of language have no intrinsic meaning, but combine in different ways to form elements (such as words) that do convey meaning (unlike animal calls, which cannot be analyzed into two such levels of structure)" (Crystal 1997:401). This criterion does not seem to apply to the signs of ASL nor to lexigrams.

Notes � Jerry H. Gill, ch 1, �If a Chimpanzee Could Talk�

The point of Ludwig Wittgenstein's remark "If a lion could talk, we could not understand him" (Philosophical Investigations, p. 223) was to call attention to the fact that linguistic meaning is woven into the very fabric of the human-way-of-being in the world, into what Wittgenstein called "the human form of life." Since lions do not participate in this form of life, we presumably would not know how to take or what to do with their utterances.

Notes - Scientific American article, �Interview with a parrot�

For months, I have been waiting to meet Alex, the celebrity African gray parrot who has given new meaning to the epithet "birdbrain." Trained by Irene M. Pepperberg of the University of Arizona, Alex may be the only nonhuman who speaks English and means what he says. The 20-year-old bird is said to count up to six and to recognize and name some 100 different objects, along with their color, texture and shape; his ability to categorize rivals that of chimpanzees.

Walking into Pepperberg's small laboratory with a friend, I am stopped short by a furious barrage of wolf whistles. Flustered, I locate the source as a medium-size gray bird with a knowing eye, standing on a table littered with fruit and paper fragments. "Alex likes tall men," explains Pepperberg, indicating my companion. Within minutes Alex is perched on his shoulder, shivering, fluttering and hopping from foot to foot with excitement. "If he really likes you," a student warns, "he'll throw up into your ear"--referring to a parrot's instinct for regurgitating food and stuffing it into a mate. "You wanna grape?" Alex suddenly asks his new consort in a nasal but perfectly clear voice. I am transfixed with awe--until Pepperberg explains that Alex occasionally uses phrases without meaning them.

Sometimes he does mean them. Ill at ease on my hand, Alex squawks, "Wanna go back," and climbs onto the back of a chair. Watching the transactions are two other African grays--Kyaaro, a nervous bird that Pepperberg likens to a child with attention-deficit disorder, and Griffin, a fluffy, wide-eyed six-month-old. It is mealtime, and while Kyaaro sips his coffee--which, I am told, helps to calm him down--Griffin is being coaxed with bits of banana. "Bread," announces Alex, and, being handed a piece of muffin, proceeds to eat carefully around the blueberries.

My friend leaves so that Alex can concentrate, and we get to work. "How many?" asks a student, displaying a tray with four corks. But Alex is in an ornery mood and will not look. "Two," he says quickly; then, "Cork nut"--his designation for an almond, his reward.

"That's wrong, Alex. No cork nut. How many?"

"Four," Alex replies. "Four," echoes Kyaaro melodically from across the room. Griffin, on my shoulder, pulls out my hairpins while I try to take notes. "You weren't looking," the student sighs and fetches a metal key and a green plastic one. "What toy?"

"Key."

"How many?"

"Two."

"What's different?"

"Color."

This time Alex gets his cork nut. While he nibbles, Griffin hops off to steal the rest of Alex's food, and I take out my camera. Instantly, Alex puffs out his feathers--or what is left of them, given that he has pulled out most of his tail--and straightens up. I have to put the device away before he can get back to work. Alex goes on to identify a stone as "rock," a square as "four corner," the letters "O" and "R" placed together as "OR" and eventually to request in a small, sad voice, "Cork nut."

Pepperberg teaches her parrots by using a threesome--herself, the bird and a student. One person holds up an object; the other names and then receives it. Listening, watching and practicing, the bird learns the word that will get him the new toy. These days Alex often substitutes for a human in teaching the younger birds. He rarely makes mistakes when in this role, and Kyaaro and Griffin learn faster from him than from humans.

For a long time, scientists believed that birds, with their small brains, were capable of no more than mindless mimicry or simple association. But Pepperberg has shown that Alex, at least, can use language creatively--and also reason with a complexity comparable to that demonstrated in nonhuman primates or cetaceans. Next, Pepperberg hopes to teach Alex that symbols such as "3" refer to a particular number of objects.

My friend returns, and Alex is distracted again. "I'm sorry," he says after a particularly poor session. "Wanna go back." It is time to leave. The parting is eased by the arrival of a tall male student. My last glimpse of the astonishing Alex reveals a scruffy gray bird dancing in ecstasy on a man's shoulder.

Notes - New York Times article, 6 June 1995, � Chimp Talk Debate: Is It Really Language?� by George Johnson

PANBANISHA, a Bonobo chimpanzee who has become something of a star among animal language researchers, was strolling through the Georgia woods with a group of her fellow primates -- scientists at the Language Research Center at Georgia State University in Atlanta. Suddenly, the chimp pulled one of them aside. Grabbing a special keyboard of the kind used to teach severely retarded children to communicate, she repeatedly pressed three symbols -- "Fight," "Mad," "Austin" -- in various combinations.

Austin is the name of another chimpanzee at the center. Dr. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, one of Panbanisha's trainers, asked, "Was there a fight at Austin's house?"

"Waa, waa, waa" said the chimpanzee, in what Dr. Savage-Rumbaugh took as a sign of affirmation. She rushed to the building where Austin lives and learned that earlier in the day two of the chimps there, a mother and her son, had fought over which got to play with a computer and joystick used as part of the training program. The son had bitten his mother, causing a ruckus that, Dr. Savage-Rumbaugh surmised, had been overheard by Panbanisha, who lived in another building about 200 feet away. As Dr. Savage-Rumbaugh saw it, Panbanisha had a secret she urgently wanted to tell.

A decade and a half after the claims of animal language researchers were discredited as exaggerated self-delusions, Dr. Savage-Rumbaugh is reporting that her chimpanzees can demonstrate the rudimentary comprehension skills of 2 1/2-year-old children. According to a series of recent papers, the Bonobo, or pygmy, chimps, which some scientists believe are more humanlike and intelligent than the common chimpanzees studied in the earlier, flawed experiments, have learned to understand complex sentences and use symbolic language to communicate spontaneously with the outside world.

"She had never put those three lexigrams together," Dr. Savage-Rumbaugh said, referring to the keyboard symbols with which the animals are trained. She found the incident, which occurred last month, particularly gratifying because the chimp seemed to be using the symbols not to demand food, which is usually the case in these experiments, but to gossip.

In a book to be published later this year, "Apes, Language and the Human Mind: Philosophical Primatology" (Routledge), Dr. Savage-Rumbaugh and her co-authors, Dr. Stuart Shanker, a philosopher at York University in Toronto, and Dr. Talbot Taylor, a linguist at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, argue that the feats of the chimps at the Language Research Center are so impressive that scientists must now re-evaluate some of their most basic ideas about the nature of language.

Most language experts dismiss experiments like the ones with Panbanisha as exercises in wishful thinking. "In my mind this kind of research is more analogous to the bears in the Moscow circus who are trained to ride unicycles," said Dr. Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies language acquisition in children. "You can train animals to do all kinds of amazing things." He is not convinced that the chimps have learned anything more sophisticated than how to press the right buttons in order to get the hairless apes on the other side of the console to cough up M & M's, bananas and other tidbits of food.

Dr. Noam Chomsky, the M.I.T. linguist whose theory that language is innate and unique to people forms the infrastructure of the field, says that attempting to teach linguistic skills to animals is irrational -- like trying to teach people to flap their arms and fly.

"Humans can fly about 30 feet -- that's what they do in the Olympics," he said in an interview. "Is that flying? The question is totally meaningless. In fact the analogy to flying is misleading because when humans fly 30 feet, the organs they're using are kind of homologous to the ones that chickens and eagles use." Arms and wings, in other words, arise from the same branch of the evolutionary tree. "Whatever the chimps are doing is not even homologous as far as we know," he said. There is no evidence that the chimpanzee utterances emerge from anything like the "language organ" Dr. Chomsky believes resides only in human brains. This neural wiring is said to be the source of the universal grammar that unites all languages.

But some philosophers, like Dr. Shanker, complain that the linguists are applying a double standard: they dismiss skills -- like putting together a noun and a verb to form a two-word sentence -- that they consider nascent linguistic abilities in a very young child.

"The linguists kept upping their demands and Sue kept meeting the demands," said Dr. Shanker. "But the linguists keep moving the goal post."

Following Dr. Chomsky, most linguists argue that special neural circuitry needed for language evolved after man's ancestors split from those of the chimps millions of years ago. As evidence they note how quickly children, unlike chimpanzees, go from cobbling together two-word utterances to effortlessly spinning out complex sentences with phrases embedded within phrases like Russian dolls. But Dr. Shanker and his colleagues insist that Dr. Savage-Rumbaugh's experiments suggest that there is not an unbridgeable divide between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom, as orthodox linguists believe, but rather a gradation of linguistic skills.

In a forthcoming book, "The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul: A Philosophical Journey Into the Brain" (M. I. T. Press), Dr. Paul Churchland, a philosopher and cognitive scientist at the University of California at San Diego, says linguists should take Dr. Savage-Rumbaugh's experiments as a challenge. He argues that the jury is still out: the rules for constructing sentences might turn out to be not so much hard-wired as a result of learning -- by people and potentially by their chimpanzee relatives.

Animal language research fell into disrepute in the late 1970's when "talking" chimps like Washoe and the provocatively named Nim Chimpsky were exposed as unintentional frauds. Because chimpanzees lack the vocal apparatus to make a variety of modulated sounds, the animals were taught a vocabulary of hand signs -- an approach first suggested in the 18th century by the French physician Julien Offray de La Mettrie. In appearances on television talk shows, trainers claimed the chimps could construct sentences of several words. But upon closer examination, scientists found strong evidence that the chimps had simply learned to please their teachers by contorting their hands into all kinds of configurations. And the trainers, straining to find examples of linguistic communication, thought they saw words among the wiggling, like children seeing pictures in the clouds.

In a widely quoted paper in the journal Science, "Can an Ape Create a Sentence?" Nim Chimpsky's trainer, Dr. Herbert Terrace, a Columbia University psychologist, reluctantly concluded that the answer was no.

A chimp might learn to connect a hand sign with an item of food, skeptics like Dr. Terrace argued, but this could be a matter of simple conditioning, like Pavlov's dogs learning to salivate at the sound of a bell. Most importantly, there was no evidence that the chimps had acquired a generative grammar -- the ability to string words together into sentences of arbitrary length and complexity.

As a young veteran of the original animal language experiments, Dr. Savage-Rumbaugh decided to try a different approach. To eliminate the ambiguity of hand signs, she used a keyboard with dozens of buttons marked with geometric symbols.

In elaborate exercises beginning in the mid 1970's, she and her colleagues taught common chimpanzees and bonobos to associate symbols with a variety of things, people and places in and around the laboratory. The smartest chimps even seemed to learn abstract categories, identifying pictures of objects as either tools or food. Dr. Savage-Rumbaugh reported that two of the chimps learned to use symbols to communicate with each other. Pecking away at the keyboard, one would tell a companion where to find a key that would liberate a banana for them both to share.

Most impressive of all was a bonobo named Kanzi. After futilely trying to train Kanzi's adopted mother to use the keyboard, the researchers found that the 2 1/2-year-old chimp, who apparently had been eavesdropping all along, had picked up an impressive vocabulary on his own. Kanzi was taught not in laboriously structured training sessions but on walks through the 50 acres of forest surrounding the language center. By the time he was 6 years old, Kanzi had acquired a vocabulary of 200 symbols and was constructing what might be taken as rudimentary sentences consisting of a word combined with a gesture or occasionally of two or three words. Dr. Savage-Rumbaugh became convinced that exposure to language must start early and that the lessons should be driven by the animal's curiosity.

Compared with other chimps, Kanzi's utterances are striking, but they are still far from human abilities. Kanzi is much better at responding to vocal commands like "Take off Sue's shoe." In one particularly arresting feat, recorded on videotape, Kanzi was told, "Give the dog a shot." The chimpanzee picked up a hypodermic syringe lying on the ground in front of him, pulled off the cap and injected a toy stuffed dog.

Dr. Savage-Rumbaugh's critics say there is nothing surprising about chimpanzees or even dogs and parrots associating vocal sounds with objects. Kanzi has been trained to associate the sound "dog" with the furry thing in front of him and has been programmed to carry out a stylized routine when he hears "shot." But does the chimp really understand what he is doing?

Dr. Savage-Rumbaugh insists that experiments using words in novel contexts show that the chimps are not just responding to sounds in a knee-jerk manner. It is true, she says, that Kanzi was initially aided by vocal inflections, hand gestures, facial expressions and other contextual clues. But once it had mastered a vocabulary, the bonobo could properly respond to 70 percent of unfamiliar sentences spoken by a trainer whose face was concealed.

None of this is very persuasive to linguists for whom the acid test of language is not comprehension but performance, the ability to use grammar to generate ever more complex sentences.

Dr. Terrace says Kanzi, like the disappointing Nim Chimpsky, is simply "going through a bag of tricks in order to get things." He is not impressed by comparisons to human children. "If a child did exactly what the best chimpanzee did, the child would be thought of as disturbed," Dr. Terrace said.

The scientists at the Language Research Center are "studying some very complicated cognitive processes in chimpanzees," Dr. Terrace said. "That says an awful lot about the evolution of intelligence. How do chimpanzees think without language, how do they remember without language? Those are much more important questions than trying to reproduce a few tidbits of language from a chimpanzee trying to get rewards."

Attempting to shift the fulcrum of the debate over performance versus comprehension, Dr. Savage-Rumbaugh argues that the linguists have things backward: "Comprehension is the route into language," she says. In her view it is easier to take an idea already in one's mind and translate it into a grammatical string of words than to decipher a sentence spoken by another whose intentions are unknown.

Dr. Shanker, the York University philosopher, believes that the linguists' objections reveal a naive view of how language works. When Kanzi gives the dog a shot, he might well be relying on all kinds of contextual clues and subtle gestures from the speaker, but that, Dr. Shanker argues, is what people do all the time.

Following the ideas of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, he argues that language is not just a matter of encoding and decoding strings of arbitrary symbols. It is a social act that is always embedded in a situation.

But trotting out Wittgenstein and his often obscure philosophy is a way of sending many linguists bolting for the exits. "If higher apes were incapable of anything beyond the trivialities that have been shown in these experiments, they would have been extinct millions of years ago," Dr. Chomsky said. "If you want to find out about an organism you study what it's good at. If you want to study humans you study language. If you want to study pigeons you study their homing instinct. Every biologist knows this. This research is just some kind of fanaticism."

There is a suspicion among some linguists and cognitive scientists that animal language experiments are motivated as much by ideological as scientific concerns -- by the conviction that intelligent behavior is not hard-wired but learnable, by the desire to knock people off their self-appointed thrones and champion the rights of downtrodden animals.

"I know what it's like," Dr. Terrace said. "I was once stung by the same bug. I really wanted to communicate with a chimpanzee and find out what the world looks like from a chimpanzee's point of view."

Washoe & Loulis

Allen and Beatrice Gardner began teaching sign language to an infant chimpanzee named Washoe in 1966. The Gardners provided Washoe with a friendly environment that they thought would be more conducive to learning. The people who cared for and taught Washoe used sign language almost exclusively in her presence. Washoe learned signs by various methods, including imitation and instrumental conditioning. Washoe was able to transfer her signs spontaneously to a new member of a class of referents; for example, she used the word "more" in a wide variety of contexts (not just for more tickling, which was the first referent) (Gardner & Gardner 1979: 190). The Gardners noted that "Washoe has transferred the DOG sign to the sound of barking by an unseen dog" (191). They also reported that Washoe began to use combinations of signs spontaneously after learning only about eight or ten of them. The Gardners soon extended their experiments to several other chimpanzees: Moja, Pili, Tatu, and Dar. They needed to replicate their success with Washoe, and they did. All of these chimpanzees "signed to friends and to strangers. They signed to each other and to themselves, to dogs and to cats, toys, tools, even to trees" (Gardner & Gardner 1989: 24). Private signing by the chimpanzees has recently been studied systematically; the study confirmed that private signing is robust (Bodamer, Fouts, Fouts & Jensvold 1994). One of the most remarkable developments in this research occurred when Washoe adopted an infant named Loulis. For the next five years, no sign language was used by humans in Loulis' presence; however, Loulis still managed to learn over 50 signs from the other chimpanzees. Bob Ingersoll, who studied Washoe and Loulis during this time, believes that there wasn't much active teaching going on, but rather Loulis picked up the signs from the other apes' use of them. The learning of signs from other chimpanzees meets Hockett's criterium of cultural transmission. Because the chimpanzees continued to use sign language without any input from humans, the Gardners concluded that "once introduced, sign language is robust and self-supporting, unlike the systems that depend on special apparatuses such as the Rumbaugh keyboards or the Premack plastic tokens" (Gardner & Gardner 1989: 25).

ALLEN GARDNER, University of Nevada:� On June 21st, 1966, an infant chimpanzee arrived in our laboratory. We named her Washoe, for Washoe County, the home of the University of Nevada. Because she was captured wild in Africa, we will never know just where or when Washoe was born, but we estimate that she was about 10 months old when she arrived in Reno.

NARRATOR:� [voice-over] Because chimps' vocal apparatus don't allow them to make the sounds of human speech, psychologists Allen and Trixie Gardner decided to teach Washoe American sign language, used by the deaf. To help Washoe learn her signs, they used many techniques, including fun and familiar games, repeated over and over again.

NARRATOR:� [voice-over] The Gardners reported that Washoe could eventually use 133 signs.

Ms. GARDNER:� Good Washoe and I are going to go.

NARRATOR:� [voice-over] By then, Washoe was five years old.

NARRATOR:� [voice-over] Altogether, the Gardners collected more than 20 years of data. Their research covered all aspects of chimp development, but it was the experiments in sign language which caught the imagination of scientists and public alike. For the first time, an ape was using human language, as these films clearly showed. But instead of sealing the ape language debate, these images were to become the focus for a bitter dispute.

In this sequence from 1974, Washoe is shown a baby doll inside a cup. The camera seems to capture clear evidence of a chimpanzee sentence, `Baby in my drink.'

NARRATOR: Treating a young ape as a human child is natural enough, but extending all the trappings of human culture to adult apes presents a number of practical problems. The chimps hand-reared by the Gardners over 20 years ago now live at Central Washington University, under the care of Roger and Debbi Fouts.

DEBBI FOUTS, Central Washington University:� They have four rooms and five tunnels, and it could be deadly boring, but instead, we try to make each day a unique, interesting day.

NARRATOR:� [voice-over] These five chimps lived as a social group in temporary accommodations on the third floor of the psychology building. This is Washoe, the chimp who, 25 years ago, learned sign language in Reno. She and the other Gardner chimps still communicate with the researchers in sign language.

Ms. FOUTS:� During the day they have any manner of things to play with. They have buckets of Kool-Aid with hoses for straws. They can dip for yogurt. They have dress-up clothes. They have brushes, toothbrushes.

[to chimp] You want what? You want a toothbrush?

NARRATOR:� [voice-over] Ape language researchers now believe that once a chimp has become accustomed to a rich human environment, it would be a cruel deprivation to lose it. These adult chimps could live for another 30 years or more. They'll require constant human care and attention.

RESEARCH ASSISTANT:� They have a lunchtime meal that is served to them. They- if they would like some more - it's usually a vegetable kind of a soup that has protein in it - they ask for more soup, and then they're served more soup. We don't ever just throw bowls in. We don't necessarily spoonfeed them. They are offered spoons and dishes to eat.

NARRATOR:� [voice-over] English is spoken here, but sign language still predominates between chimp and human. Debbi Fouts has published work describing the signing between the chimps when no one else is present. Students have observed how signs are used by the chimps to initiate conversations. Before she was brought here, Washoe had already given birth to two infants, neither of whom lived beyond a few weeks. The second baby died after being taken away from her for medical treatment. It was Roger Fouts's job to make Washoe understand what had happened.

ROGER FOUTS, Central Washington University:� I had to go back the next morning, and she was very depressed, of course, and quite, quite alone, not signing with anybody. And so I went in, and she came up to me, her eyes lit up. She came up to me and she said, `Baby, holding, holding.' And it was a question, she was saying, basically, `Where's my baby?' And I had to tell her, I said, `He's dead. He's finished.' And with that, the baby sign literally dropped into her lap, her head dropped, and she moved away into the corner and stopped signing.

So we searched and searched and searched, and 10 days after his death, we finally found a replacement. It was Loulis [sp?], he was 10 months old. The next morning I went in and I signed, `Have baby.' And she immediately started signing, `Baby, baby,' getting very excited, `Baby, baby, baby, baby, baby,' slapping her hands, bipedal, hair up, extreme excitement. And then when she signed, `My baby,' I knew we were in trouble. I knew she misunderstood me. So I went out and got him, 10-month-old, he was on my chest, came in, and then went in the enclosure with her, and when I got about maybe two or three feet away she got a good look at him. And all this time she's signing, `Baby, baby, baby, baby,' and she gets a good look at him and she just sits down. And then she looks back up, and the she signs, `Baby.' Obviously, she'd realized it wasn't her baby any longer, it was a strange baby.

That night she tried to sleep with him like her own baby. She always took her to bed with her and slept with her, and so on, and slept with him. She tried to do that with Loulis, too, and he would have nothing to do with it. He laid down on his own end of the bench, and when she'd come he'd move, until finally she let him. And then, at 4:00 in the morning, she woke up, went into a bipedal swagger, banged the enclosure and signed, `Come, hug,' slapping her hands, making a loud noise, and with that he jumped up out of a sound sleep and leapt into the nearest hairy arms that were available, which were hers, and she literally engulfed him and lay back down. And from that moment on, they were inseparable.

[to chimp] Washoe, Washoe, hey, hey, what's this?

NARRATOR:� [voice-over] From the time Loulis arrived, the researchers deliberately restricted their signing to Washoe, to test whether or not Loulis would learn sign language without human intervention. By the time he was five, they reported that Loulis had learned a total of 51 signs.

Mr. FOUTS:� Loulis.

NARRATOR:� [voice-over] In May, 1993, the chimps were finally moved out of the psychology building into a new specially designed home.

Mr. FOUTS;� If you want good research, you have to have proper care. You owe them that, at least. They're not volunteers, they don't want to do this. We're still at the notion of treating them like a hairy test tube, and that's an abomination. They are not hairy test tubes. They are thinking, feeling, emotional beings with wants, desires in a life, just like we do.

NARRATOR:� [voice-over] As this research proceeds, it could have some powerful implications. If chimpanzees show they can acquire human language, use it to communicate, and manipulate abstract symbols like words and numbers, then the possibility is that chimp and human minds have a great deal more in common than we thought.

Ms. GARDNER:� The uses and misuses to which we put animals certainly have to do with lines that we draw differentiating ourselves from them. I'm certain that even within human populations, when we behave in a way that is not humanitarian, it is because we draw a distinction. `If these people are not like me, they don't have the same rights.' By drawing a continuity, I think we behave in a more human fashion to all concerned.

Mr. GARDNER:� The reason why this research has become so controversial is that it's part of a very long battle, not the battle over whether human beings are descended from chimpanzees, but the battle over whether the same laws of nature apply to mice and leopards and chimpanzees and human beings. Most of the history of modern science has been a retreat from the notion of human speciality, and people more or less have accepted this now about blood and bone, but behavior, emotion, cognition, that's very hard. You can see the history of science of behavior as a slow, retreating battle with separatists drawing the wagons in an ever-tightening circle. And right now the last great stand seems to be made over language.

Dr. SAVAGE-RUMBAUGH:� If we take seriously the fact that the chimpanzee has an understanding of language and an ability to produce language, it raises all kinds of other questions. Are they conscious? How should we treat them? Are they rational? Should they have chimpanzee rights? And we're not prepared to answer all of these questions. We don't really know.

Nim

Herbert S. Terrace was skeptical of the reported success of the chimpanzees Washoe, Sarah, and Lana. He believed that there were simpler explanations for many of the reported interpretations of these apes' language use. Although Terrace admitted that the apes had achieved something significant, he compared their behaviour to that of pigeons who are taught to peck different colours in a certain order (Terrace 1979: 20). He also believed that the apes used signs only to receive rewards from their human trainers. When Terrace set up his own experiment with the chimpanzee Nim, "Nim's main reward for learning to sign was our approval and being able to sign about something that was important to him" (Terrace 1979: 145). Nim was raised like a human child and taught sign language in similar ways to those of Washoe. He was observed practicing his signs in the absence of their referents (Terrace 1979: 143). Nim often signed DIRTY (used when he had to go to the toilet) or SLEEP when he was bored and wanted a change. He used the signs BITE and ANGRY to express his feelings, and he tended not to attack if he perceived that his warning was heeded; this is an important substitution of an arbitrary word for a physical action, displaying Hockett's property of specialization (the speaker does not act out messages). Although Nim learned many words, Terrace concluded that Nim could not combine words to create new meanings on his own. He believed, from viewing videotapes, that the combinations of words that Nim used were prompted by prior utterances from his trainers. The other thing Terrace discovered from the videotapes was that Nim interrupted his trainers more than human children interrupt their parents. Terrace has a good point: if we are going to say that apes can create a sentence, we must eliminate the other possible explanations for the utterances (Terrace 1979: 219). Terrace is not as much of a skeptic as some others make him out to be, though; he believed that the conditions under which Project Nim were operated were not ideal, and future projects might have more success if they were able to instill a greater motivation to sign in their subjects (Terrace 1979: 223).

The problems began when another chimp began his career as a language student, commuting daily to Columbia University in New York. The researcher, Herb Terrace [sp?], was trying to replicate the Gardner study using his own ape, called Nim Chimsky. The name was a lighthearted dig at linguist Noam Chomsky, who believed language ability was confined to the human species. Terrace hoped to teach Nim to assemble signs into sentences, using the rules of grammar, but the experiment did not turn out quite as Terrace planned.

HERB TERRACE:� The main goal of Project Nim was to ask whether a chimpanzee could create a sentence. I have concluded that, unfortunately, the answer to that question is no.

NARRATOR:� [voice-over] In this example, Nim seems to be using a combination of signs to ask if he can hug the cat, but Terrace argued that he was not actually making a sentence. By freezing the tape, you can see that first the trainer makes the sign for hug, and just a few frames later, Nim copies her. Next, the trainer signs cat, and shortly after, so does Nim. Terrace concluded that chimps cannot produce language, they can just imitate their trainers. Terrace also looked at some of the Gardners' films. He decided that Washoe, too, was being led by her teacher. The Gardners disagreed, and attacked Terrace's methodology.

Mr. GARDNER:� Well, Herb Terrace set out to prove that if you use Skinnerian reinforcement you could teach a chimpanzee syntax. It was an entirely different objective from ours. And when he failed, he declared that everybody had failed.

NARRATOR:� [voice-over] The Gardners also point out that in the disputed example, Washoe's signs are quite different from her teacher's, and so can't possibly be imitation. Susan is asking, `What that?' and Washoe answers, `Baby in my drink.' This, they say, was a typical conversation, and was interesting because of its similarity to ordinary conversations between adults and young children.

Mr. GARDNER:� What we were interested in is not whether it fitted some abstract theory of linguistics, but whether the chimpanzees could actually communicate information to us, things we didn't already know.

NARRATOR:� [voice-over] The Gardners continued their experiments with four more chimps who, like Washoe, were all brought up as human children. They tested their ability to communicate under controlled, double-blind conditions. The chimp could see an image on the screen, but the experimenter could not. Two independent observers had to agree for the sign to be marked correct. The chimps showed reliable and consistent signing. They had vocabularies above 100 signs, and each used them in their own individual ways.

Lana

The chimpanzee Lana learned to use another language system, an electronic keyboard. The Lana Project was headed by Duane Rumbaugh, who wanted to create a situation which would "allow for the systematic variations of training procedures that would differentially influence the course of acquiring and using linguistic skills" (Rumbaugh, Warner & von Glasersfeld 1977: 87). The language of lexigrams, each of which represented one word, was called Yerkish. When Lana pressed a key with a lexigram on it, that key would light up and the lexigram would appear on a projector. When keys were pressed accidentally, Lana used the PERIOD key (end of sentence) as an eraser so that she could restart the sentence; Lana did this on her own before it occurred to the researchers (Rumbaugh & Gill 1977: 167). Lana also started using NO as a protest (for example, when someone else was drinking a Coke and she did not have one) after having learned it as a negation ("it is not true that...") (Rumbaugh & Gill 1977: 169-170). Lana acquired "many linguistic-type skills for which she had received no specific training" which showed her ability to abstract and generalize (Rumbaugh & Gill 1977: 190). For example, she spontaneously used THIS to refer to things for which she had no name, and she invented names for things by combining lexigrams in new ways. Lana's trainers admit that

we cannot assume that Lana 'understands' the meaning of every word she uses as we do, but the consistent appropriateness of her novel sentence constructions ... support the conclusion that she has conceptual meanings for many of them and also for their relationships (Rumbaugh & Gill 1977: 192).

NARRATOR:� [voice-over] One attempt at getting data free from bias involved Lana. Instead of sign language, she was given a computer keyboard, with symbols to represent words. The keys she pressed were automatically recorded, so there could be no argument over what she had said.

DUANE RUMBAUGH, Georgia State University:� The keys were made of plastic. They were backlighted, and when they were touched they gained an additional level of brilliance. Then a facsimile of the lexagram on the surface of the key was produced in one of the projectors in a row above her keyboard, and thus she was able to produce a string of lexagrams, if you would, a primitive sentence. So this was the idea that launched the Lana project and the idea which, in fact, has carried the research project with chimpanzees and also with children across the time span now of better than 20 years.

Kanzi, Matata and Panbanisha

In 1979, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, had started using a bonobo named Matata in her studies. Matata was the first bonobo to be used in these studies and it was expected that she would do well as bonobos were thought to be generally more intelligent than common chimpanzees but the results were not encouraging. (1) Her adopted son Kanzi, however, seemed fascinated by the keyboard that she was trying to learn to use. (2) At about the age of two, Kanzi began to spontaneously use the keyboard to initiate a game of "chase". (3) At this point Matata had spent 2 years on language training and mastered very few lexigrams. She would become frustrated with the fact that she couldn't seem to make her trainer understand what she wanted. It was thought that Matata's problem was that she started language training at the age of 10 years, possibly too old for language acquisition.

On the first official day of language training, Kanzi astonished his trainers by knowing and using several keys on the keyboard correctly to name items and to announce his intention. It appeared that although his adopted mother Matata never mastered the keyboard, Kanzi had been paying attention. (4) After 17 months, Kanzi had a vocabulary of about fifty symbols and was regularly using combinations of words. Unlike some other apes, Kanzi's multi word utterances seemed to reflect real comprehension and 90% of these were spontaneous. (5) Rumbaugh also believed that many of Kanzi's communications had a character of novelty and functioned to suggest completely new actions and alternatives to the normal way of doing things. He also used three world utterances to indicate someone other than himself as the agent or recipient of an action such as tickle or chase. (6)

The next major breakthrough that Rumbaugh noted was that Kanzi seemed to be capable of understanding human speech. This fact was amazing in itself but seemed even more incomprehensible because there was no attempt to train Kanzi to understand spoken language.

This wasn't a new concept. Understanding of human language was reported with Washoe and other apes but was refuted by Herbert Terrace in 1979. (7) In response to this, Rumbaugh reported:

"Results indicate that the propensity of the pygmy chimpanzee for the acquisition of primitive language skills is considerably in advance of that yet reported for other apes. Language acquisition in the pygmy chimpanzee seems to be accompanied and facilitated by the ability to understand spoken english."

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NARRATOR:� [voice-over] Duane Rumbaugh's computer technology and Sue Savage-Rumbaugh's experience with signing chimpanzees led to a formidable alliance which has given ape language research a fresh start. Here in Atlanta, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh also had access to a different species of chimpanzee. Previous research used the common chimpanzee, but she was attracted by a number of differences found in the bonobo.

Excerpt from Nova program, �Can chimps talk?�

JANINE MURPHY [sp?]:� Kanzi, this is Janine. Would you like any food? Tell me what food you'd like.

TALKING KEYBOARD:� Food surprise.

Ms. MURPHY:� Some food surprise?

TALKING KEYBOARD:� Food surprise.

Ms. MURPHY:� Kanzi, would you like a juice, or some M&Ms, or some sugar cane?

TALKING KEYBOARD:� M&Ms.

Ms. MURPHY:� You like M&Ms? Okay. Kanzi, is there any other food you'd like me to bring in the backpack?

TALKING KEYBOARD:� Ball.

Ms. MURPHY:� A ball? Okay.

NARRATOR:� [voice-over] This conversation is the first time that the chimp Kanzi has ever spoken on the telephone, using his talking keyboard. On the other end of the phone was Janine Murphy. It was a conversation with someone not physically present, about events yet to take place. It's not the kind of thing which scientists thought chimpanzees could do.

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Dr. SAVAGE-RUMBAUGH:� This species is very, very rare and endangered, found only in a small area of Zaire, and was only identified as a separate species in 1929. They differ from the so-called common chimpanzee in a number of ways. First of all, they have very stable large social groups in which there are strong ties between males and females. They have a very, very low level of aggression, and the society seems organized around caring for young bonobos. Subjectively, it has an extraordinarily different feel from other chimpanzees. The facial expressions of bonobos are much more humanlike. The vocalizations of bonobos are much more frequent and much higher-pitched. Common chimpanzees, although very wonderful creatures are, compared to the bonobo, somewhat stand-offish. The bonobos like physical contact, they like to be around people. Kanzi's mother, who was a wild-caught bonobo, is one of my very best friends.

NARRATOR:� [voice-over] Matada [sp?] was also the starting point for what has been described as a groundbreaking project, to establish just how well a chimpanzee can develop a competence with human language.

Dr. SAVAGE-RUMBAUGH:� We began with Matada, and she was not a very adept pupil. Matada seemed to have many ways of communicating. She would lead me around by the hand, she would vocalize, she would look off in the distance and vocalize and gesture to me, and I had no question but what she was trying to communicate with me. But she seemed to think lexagrams were a rather ridiculous method of communication.

NARRATOR:� [voice-over] But while Matada wasn't learning, her son Kanzi very rapidly caught on to the possibilities of the keyboard when he was only a few months old. He learned that each abstract symbol on the board meant something. Here, he pressed `bite.' What he wanted was a bite of what Sue had in her mouth. His use of symbols was the equivalent of a young child using single words.

Ten years later, Kanzi easily identifies words spoken by complete strangers, and can echo them by pressing the correct key on the lexagram board, which now talks.

TALKING KEYBOARD:� Potato. Shoe. Give.

Dr. SAVAGE-RUMBAUGH:� The most exciting thing with Kanzi was that he began to use this keyboard very, very frequently. He clearly helped us understand that he knew what those symbols meant. For example, if Kanzi said something like, `Chase apple,' he then would go over and pick up the apple and start running away, and look back at me, showing me behaviorally that he knew what he had said, and gauging me.

When I first found out that Kanzi was learning language without any attempt on my part to really teach him, it was just as we were coming up for funding renewal. Kanzi was about three or three and a half years of age, and the site visitors kept asking me, `Well, we understand that Kanzi's doing this, we've seen him do it, we hear you say that he's learning how to understand words in some sentences, but how is he doing it? How did you teach him to do it? How did you get him to do it?'

And I was at a complete loss. I said, `Well, parents really don't know how they teach their children language. Why should I have to know how I teach Kanzi language? I just act normal around him and he learns it. I don't really know what's going on in his head.' But they made me realize that, unlike a parent, as a scientist I really had an obligation to figure out how this was happening.

Kanzi was an ape, not a child, and so I wanted to construct some kind of environment that would make the usage of language real for Kanzi. And I asked myself, `Well, what do apes do in the wild?' Well, everyone knows they travel around to different places and they find food and they eat it, so I decided, because we had 55 acres of forest, to have certain feeding areas, and to spend Kanzi's days traveling from place to place, talking about where we were going to go, what kind of food we were going to eat, and what we were going to do next.

NARRATOR:� [voice-over] The experiment continued with Kanzi's sister, and everyday use of English language.

RESEARCH ASSISTANT:� Panbanisha, will you do something for Sue?

Dr. SAVAGE-RUMBAUGH:� And then you'll chase her.

RESEARCH ASSISTANT:� And then I'll chase you.

TALKING KEYBOARD:� Yes. No. Chase.

Dr. SAVAGE-RUMBAUGH:� Tell her yes, you'll chase her, but you want her to do something for me later on.

RESEARCH ASSISTANT:� And I want you to do something for Sue.

Dr. SAVAGE-RUMBAUGH:� Now, we're going to do some things, and then Ryan will chase you, okay, Panbanisha? Could you throw the kiwi? Good job, good job. Thank you. You can have some jelly, it's all right. Let's go chase, Ryan.

Dr. SAVAGE-RUMBAUGH:� What we have begun to learn is that chimpanzees and, I suspect as well, children have an intrinsic desire to try to figure out what's going to happen to them next. They would like their world to be predictable, whether they're going for a walk in the woods, whether they're going down to visit the river. They'd sort of like to know, when they're very young, in particular, what everybody is going to do next. And so, because they really want to know this, there's an intrinsic desire to figure out what the language is about.

Dr. SAVAGE-RUMBAUGH:� I've got the onions in a bowl. Let's go put them in our hot food and we'll come back and turn the TV on. Put your onions right here and put them in your bowl. Look, you spilled some of them.

NARRATOR:� [voice-over] The chimps have responded well to such a rich environment, and show an unprecedented grasp of spoken English.

Dr. SAVAGE-RUMBAUGH:� Let me get you a spoon to stir it with, Kanzi.

NARRATOR:� [voice-over] In addition to spoken language, they receive a steady stream of nonverbal cues, attention-directing maneuvers, and repetition, the hallmarks of the way we speak to young children.

Dr. SAVAGE-RUMBAUGH:� Here, will you wash this potato off for me? Could you wash the potato?

NARRATOR:� [voice-over] Sue Savage-Rumbaugh is convinced that the combination of all these everyday interactions at an early age is essential for the acquisition of language. Scientists call this process enculturation.

Dr. SAVAGE-RUMBAUGH:� All right. Your noodles are going to go in here, and you can have a few of them for your tummy. Kanzi, could you turn the water off again, please? Turn the water off, please.

NARRATOR:� [voice-over] In the kitchen, in Sue's company, Kanzi functions impressively. But does Kanzi, like a human, really have the ability to understand words? He can match spoken words with lexagrams, but what do they mean to him? Can he make the connection between words and things in the real world under test conditions?

A set of 16 photographs has been selected from the several hundred which represent the nouns in his vocabulary.

Dr. SAVAGE-RUMBAUGH:� Okay, here's your pictures. Here's your pictures. Watch now, they're coming around. All right. Kanzi, see if you can find mushrooms. Mushrooms. That's right, those are the mushrooms. Real good. Can you turn back around? Okay. Now, now- okay, you're doing real good, Kanzi. See if you can find Mardu [sp?] the orangutan. Do you see Mardu? Good job. Good job. See if you can find some melon. Melon. Melon. Thank you.

NARRATOR:� [voice-over] Kanzi consistently scores better than 90 percent with such sets of pictures. A more rigorous test involves Kanzi wearing headphones, so only he can hear which picture is being requested.

RESEARCH ASSISTANT:� Kanzi, give Sue bananas. That's right. Kanzi, give Sue ice. That's right. Kanzi, give Sue pears. That's right. Kanzi, give Sue potatoes.

NARRATOR:� [voice-over] The tests on single words are convincing, but how does Kanzi deal with words in combination? How do researchers know that he is not just doing the most obvious thing, given the range of possibilities available to him? One of the hallmarks of human language is its creativity, the possibility of expressing an infinite number of ideas. We can understand the meaning of a sentence even if we have never heard its words in that particular order ever before. Dr. Savage-Rumbaugh set out to test whether the same applied to Kanzi. There were 600 sentences in all, designed to use different grammatical forms and to be as unpredictable as possible.

Dr. SAVAGE-RUMBAUGH:� Give the doggie a shot. Good job. Put the keys in the refrigerator. Good job. Thank you. Very nice. Okay. Go get the ball that's outdoors.

NARRATOR:� [voice-over] To do this, Kanzi has to ignore another ball which is indoors. That Kanzi could comprehend and carry out such instructions is interesting enough, but Dr. Savage-Rumbaugh went a step further. How did Kanzi's understanding of language compare with that of human children? Janine Murphy volunteered her daughter, Alea [sp?], to take part in an identical study at the age of two years. On some sentence types, Kanzi excelled; on others the child did better. But by and large, both were correct about three-quarters of the time. So far as comprehension went, child and chimp were on a par.

Dr. SAVAGE-RUMBAUGH:� Could you take my shoe off, please? You might need to untie it.

NARRATOR:� [voice-over] For both child and chimp, the ability to understand outstripped their ability to produce language, the girl because of her age, and Kanzi because the chimpanzee vocal tract does not allow it.

Dr. SAVAGE-RUMBAUGH:� :� Now you can take it off. It will come off now.

Mr. SAVAGE:� It is in what an individual comprehends that we use as the basis for saying that individual is language-competent. If they can't speak because of some anatomic reason, we don't say, well, they don't have language. We say that they can't speak and they need some other kind of medium for that.

TALKING KEYBOARD:� Want milk. Milk.

Dr. SAVAGE-RUMBAUGH:� You want some milk? I know, you always want some milk when you're planning to be good.

TALKING KEYBOARD:� Key. Matada. Good.

Dr. SAVAGE-RUMBAUGH:� Oh, you want the key to Matada, and you're going to be good. Well, I'm glad to hear that. I'm glad to hear that.

Dr. SAVAGE-RUMBAUGH:� For a long time, it was thought that only the human brain could understand human speech. Now we know that Kanzi's brain can understand human speech, which says very clearly that something important happened in our evolution. Our brains were able to understand speech, and suddenly our mouths became able to produce speech.

NARRATOR:� [voice-over] The sudden emergence of speech from a hominid, which hitherto had, like the ape, only a potential for language, may be linked with our unique anatomy.

Dr. SAVAGE-RUMBAUGH:� I suspect that there's something very, very unique about the human bipedal posture and the human vocal laryngeal apparatus. One of the things that we know it enables us to do is make sounds like ga and ba and pa and da, sounds that we call consonants. Kanzi can't make these kinds of sounds. His sounds are mostly vowel sounds. And if I try to talk to another person using only vowel sounds, they can't understand me.

NARRATOR:� [voice-over] Kanzi often tries to copy human speech, but analysis of the voiceprints of human and bonobo shows the problem. The human print shows the boundaries of the words clearly, where Kanzi's are blurred.

Dr. SAVAGE-RUMBAUGH:� We tried to invent a language for Kanzi that was composed only of vowel sounds, and we couldn't understand ourselves, which tells you what consonants do for us. They wrap little packages around vowel sounds. They are like edges around vowel sounds, and they help us tell our words apart, where one word stops and another word starts. And because we could do that, we could invent languages. We could utter new sounds that� were discriminably different. We could go around and name all kinds of things with words that sounded different to other individuals. And I think this must have been a great turning point in the evolution of mankind. And I think if you could give chimpanzees or bonobos that same ability today, they would take off and they might follow a course that would be eerily similar to that of our own species.

---

NARRATOR:� [voice-over] Chimps do acquire complex skills in the wild, but this happens slowly, over many years. Some groups have learned to use stones as hammers and anvils to crack nuts. In Atlanta, they found that Kanzi was able to grasp such a skill with amazing ease by watching a demonstration and then trying it for himself in the forest.

Kanzi was also able to make his own tools after watching a demonstration by a visiting archaeologist. He went on to show particular insight and creativity in his approach to problem-solving. He was presented with this puzzle box, held closed by a strong rope. He quickly caught on to the solution, and also found his own way of making a sharp tool by throwing, rather than striking the stones together in his hand. His way was just as effective. Kanzi's ability to observe tool use and quickly adapt it for his own purposes is very significant. This facility is not seen in wild chimpanzees, only in those who have been exposed to human culture. Perhaps we are seeing in a chimpanzee the same stages of learning that our ancestors must have experienced.

Going back in time from the human species today, we see that some three million years ago our ancestor might have looked something like this, not very different yet from the way the bonobo chimps look today when they walk upright, with hands free. Archaeology can reveal much about our own past, but words leave no fossils, and scientists have to depend upon comparisons between living species to draw conclusions about how our own capacity for language might have come about. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh's findings point to an origin of language which goes back several million years, and may even predate human evolution.

Notes � Nova program, �Can chimps talk?�

Language acquisition in apes vs children

PATRICIA MARKS GREENFIELD, UCLA:� I think that there are a lot of people who are very worried about us finding a relationship between humans and animals, and they want there to be an absolute dividing line. What Terrace did was again to say, `Yes, there is a line,' and I think people responded very emotionally. And instead of it just being another point of view where it would be interesting to do further research and see who was right, Terrace or the people who had done the early work, such as the Gardners, the whole field just closed down.

NARRATOR:� [voice-over] Eventually, the Gardners' funding ran out, and their chimps were moved to another university. The early dreams of rearing them to adolescence and beyond were never fulfilled. While the eight researchers were battling over Washoe, Nim and definitions of language, Patricia Greenfield was taking a fresh look at how human children use their first words. If apes were a species on the threshold of developing language, it seemed logical to compare them with a child at a similar point. Her subjects were even closer to home. She studied her own children, Matthew and Lauren. Here is Matthew with his mother now, and this is Matthew, captured on film at the age of two as part of the study.

Ms. GREENFIELD:� I knew all about the Chomskyan approach to child language development, which is an approach in which grammar is very central, and the child is considered sort of like a little grammar machine, or becoming a big grammar machine. And when my daughter Lauren started to speak, what absolutely hit me was that this was not- what she was doing was nothing like what they were describing. And in fact, what they were describing were children combining words with words, using rules, but what she was doing when she first started to talk was combining words with things, with people, with gesture, all sorts of nonverbal elements.

Do you want another piece of cheese?

LAUREN:� Yes.

NARRATOR:� [voice-over] Greenfield showed that these verbal and nonverbal elements had a grammar of their own. This was the foundation on which full-blown language would be built.

Ms. GREENFIELD:� Would you like some potato?

LAUREN:� Open.

Ms. GREENFIELD:� But that approach was very unpopular, and was very heavily criticized, I think to a large extent because of the bias that words are realer than these nonverbal elements, and that if somebody expresses something in a word, you know it was really there.

NARRATOR:� [voice-over] Greenfield, too, looked at the Gardners' films and saw that their chimps combined word signs with gestures to get their meaning across. This could be the same precursor to language as she had seen in children.

Tatu

Ms. GARDNER:� Tatu, unlike the others, had black as her very favorite color. We would go through magazines, looking for black things, and she would go around naming black things for you. `That's black, and that's black, and that is black.' And sometimes you could even tease her about that. You'd go through a magazine and she'd point at it, at a picture, and give you eye-to-eye contact - the question, `What is that?' - and for a while, you played her game and you said, `It's black, it's black,' using her favorite sign. But then you'd tease her and say it was red, and of course she would correct you right away and say, `It's black. That's black.' It's a very nice conversational use of sign language. She knew the answer, but she wanted you to talk about that.

Bonobos

[The appearance of bonobos make them] the most human-like of all apes. Their stride, their stance, their resting postures, their gestures, and their facial expressions all look more like our own than those of chimpanzees, gorillas or orangutans. Often, in the forest, large groups of 200 to 300 individuals come together for what appear to be "visits." During such times, there is almost constant "talking" or vocal exchange, as though they are catching up on past gossip---however, we really do not know, as study of these apes is barely in its infancy.

--from the Bonobo Protection Fund

Bonobos (the "Left Bank Chimps"), also known as pygmy chimpanzees, were the last ape species to be identified, some three centuries after the other apes were known to science. That's because they only live in one small and shrinking place, the swampy equatorial forests of the left bank of the Congo River (common chimps are the Right Bank Chimps, extending from Tanzania and Uganda all of the way to West Africa). Behaviorally, these two Pan species are our closest cousins.

Currently, bonobo populations number less than 20,000 individuals. This number is assumed to be dropping. Political unrest in Zaire is preventing researchers from entering the country, and has led to the end of negotiations with the government to set aside more protected land for bonobo habitat. Previous to the war in Zaire, reserves were being patrolled regularly in order to protect existing bonobo populations from poaching. Today, the guards have left their stations because of a lack of financial support and the threat of war. This leaves bonobos completely unprotected. Researchers fear the worst.

Bonobos are also called pygmy chimpanzees. The name pygmy chimp was bestowed by Westerners in the 1930's, not because the animals were diminutive in size, but because they lived near human pygmies. It is important to understand that bonobos (Pan paniscus) are not chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes). While they share the same genus, bonobos and chimps are markedly distinct species.

The uncommon social structure, sexual behavior and intellectual capacity of bonobos reveal compelling clues about the roots of human nature. Bonobo anatomy is eerily similar to that of our early human ancestors. Bonobos and humans share 98% of the same genes.

Europe: West Berlin (4 bonobos), Frankfurt (8), Cologne (5), Leipzig (3), Stuttgart (8), Wuppertal (5), Twycross (UK, 5), Planckendael (BE, 9), Apeldoorn (NL, multiple), and Antwerp (BE, 2).

Americas: Morelia (Mexico, 3 bonobos), San Diego Zoo (9) and Wild Animal Park (CA: 6), Cincinnati OH (6), Columbus OH (7), Fort Worth TX(3), Milwaukee WI(11).

Glossary

baboons (papio) - cynocephalus - yellow, anubis - olive, ursinis - chacma, papio Guinea, hamadryas - hamadryas - babies every 2 years - eat fruit, seeds, young grass, insects, corms, small mammals, new leaves, rhyzomes - dig holes for water - males tolerant of black infants, less so of juveniles - mounting is social as well as sexual

behaviourist - some things are not genetically based - relationships of animals to environment and other animals - isolated mothers don't raise young successfully - use deductive reasoning - observe behaviour, don't impute intelligence

black lemurs - female slightly larger than male - mainly arboreal - small multi-multi groups - scent marking - females tend to assert themselves against males

blue monkeys - quadrupedal movement - troops about 20, 1 male - cheek pouches less alloparenting - bouncing form of locomotion characteristic of young - most males leave their natal troop - social play among adults too - less grooming, but peaceful relations

bonobos (pygmy chimpanzees) - bipedalism widely practiced - sleep in nests - large multi-multi groups fission-fusion societies - females live natal groups - competition and aggression rare - males may take part in child rearing - food sharing occurs, mostly between females broad sexual repertoire - sociosexual behaviour - juveniles and infants also engage in sex - maintain social bonds with all members of group

callitrichidae - smaller new world monkeys - marmosets and tamarins - small - males and females look alike - twins common - juveniles help raise young

capuchin monkeys - 3-15 kg - single male groups - eat insects, birds, lizards, frogs don't groom or rest much

cebidae - larger new world monkeys - capuchin - cebus, squirrel - saimiri, howler alouatta - woolly spider - brachteles arachnoides

chacma baboons - more fierce in defense against predators - fewer trees in their habitat

chimpanzees - open male-bonded groups - no tail - grooming between males - vocalize loudly when they want to locate others, when something exciting happens - eat leaves, small fruit, insects, nuts - brachiators - lifelong relations between mothers and children who stay in the group - baby usually dies if its mother dies before it's weaned elaborate greeting ceremonies - central male group does boundary control - when two animals come together, dominant one puts arm over the other

communication - 4 parts: signal, motivation, meaning, function - what's the unit size of a signal - meaning is context-based - proximate function is immediate, ultimate function is long-term

communication, basic - what you can't lie about - sex, age, species, sexual receptivity (estrus swelling), sickness, fear scent in gorillas

communication channel - actual nervous input that comes into brain - eg. sense of smell, touch, heating

communication, interactive - individual has some choice with this - eg. do I make a scent mark, threat

communication modality - what you do with a particular channel - olfactory channel: scent marking, pheromone production - visual channel: facial gestures, hand and body gestures, piloerection, kinesis, proxemics- auditory channel: clear calls, harsh calls

communication, nonverbal - sounds, but not words

communication, nonvocal - everything but sounds - subtle, fast, accurate

displays - set of behaviours that are ritualized and have become a signal - stereotyped form (often exaggerated) and repeated, always at same intensity - to release tension, intimidate others, keep others out of your range - eg. gorilla chest beating, chimpanzee greeting - behaviour comes from autonomic responses, intention movements, and displacement activities

dominance - not a permanent trait, always within some context, not a genetically inherited trait, can be for females as well as males

dominant - an animal gets its own way

gelada, Theropithecus (bleeding heart baboon) - sleep on cliffs in mountainous regions of Ethiopia - groups fission when 7 or 8 females - several groups make up a band, several bands make up a herd

gibbons - heavily forest areas of SE Asia - ischial callosities - don't make nests, sit in trees like monkeys - intermembral index 130+ (arms longer than legs) - don't walk quadrupedally (or bipedally much) - territorial, defend 90% of range - monogamous pairs - spend lots of time in canopy - lots of grooming

gorillas - berengi - mountain, grauri - eastern lowlands, gorilla - western lowlands male-female relationship basis of cohesion of group - half of their day is spent feeding males don't participate in raising children - eat leaves, stems, bamboo, bark - females more arboreal (smaller) - build nests, use them for one night only - chest beating is adult intimidation - adult male may take baby if mother dies - walk on knuckles - lots of time sitting upright - extensive overlap in ranges - get water from plants - females leave group often when just presexual

hamadryas baboons - male herds females in its group - other male kidnaps young females and cares for them until they're sexually mature - hamadryas male can herd anubis females - male will bite females who try to leave group

Hanuman langurs (Semnopithecus entellus) - sacred monkeys in India - one-male or multi-male groups - lots of allomothering - in Dharwar, high population density, infants may be killed in male takeovers of groups - in Orcha, low population density, no male takeovers of groups

howler monkeys - highly arboreal - 15 kg - hyoid bone in throat is huge - bare patch on bottom of tail to grip tree - long fingers and toes, prehensile tails - saecum to digest leaves

instinctive behaviour - behaviour without observation, eg. clinging, sucking, rooting ritualized (occurs same way each time), comes from a particular stimulus (eg. hunger)

interaction, conflict - neither participant gets what they want -eg. males fighting over a female, another male takes it away

interaction, conflict assymetric - one animal gives in because of harassment - eg. male harasses a female until she lets him mount

interaction, mutual - actions of animals are cooperative - eg. grooming

interaction, reactive - one animal attempts to interact, other ignores - eg. male lets female eat nearby

Japanese macaques - central-peripheral structure: leader males and females in centre, then females, then young males - linear dominance hierarchy - matrilinear structure important, males move into group - males care for juveniles and infants in some groups - animal indicates where it wants to be groomed by position

language - allows us to deal with generalizations, abstractions, symbols, past and future, distance from emotion - based on code system - it's a second language for the apes - are they trying to please the researcher, solve task, get what they want, or is it actual two-way communication - people who've known each other for a long time don't use full sentences so why should apes

learned behaviour - often variable, observed before doing it successfully, stimulus variability - eg. mothering skills, communication

lemur, dwarf (cheirogaleus) - store up fat in tails - become torpid below 18 degrees and hibernate for 1-5 months - nest in holes in trees

lemur, mouse (microcebus) - sleep alone or in groups in nests - forage by themselves basically noyau - seasonal breeding

lemur, ring tail (lemurcatta) - arboreal, quadrupedal - group living - crepuscular seasonal breeding - stink fights

lion-tail macaques - rare - grey wrap around face, darker coat - food pouches - adult play more common than in other species

macaques (macaca) - fuscata - Japanese, sylvanus - barbary, radiata - bonnet, hemistrina - pigtail, fascicularis - crab-eater - female-bonded groups - display with branch shaking - hybrids between subspecies occur both in wild and captivity

marmosets - ringed tails

orangutans - rarely groom other animals - solitary animals much of the time - young play with objects and each other - feet are prehensile - walk with weight on fists females have ranges that overlap - males have much larger ranges that overlap ranges of several females - pairs of adolescents may hang out together - big throat sac to scare others away

pair - male and female with offspring form group - territorial, not much sexual dimorphism- eg. gibbons, siamangs

prosimians - wet rhinarium - vibrissae - tapetum - longer nose, sideways-facing eyes mixture of nails and claws - less manipulative hands - multiple young - use a nest more teeth - tethered upper lip - often nocturnal - vertical clinging and leaping, branch walking or running - arboreal, sense of smell important

range - area that includes places to sleep, water, food rank - level of social influence

Sade's hypothesis - offspring are in their mother's dominance shadow - animals rise to the rank of their mother in normal circumstances

safari pairs - consorting couple - could last for a couple of months - move to edge of group and hang out together - eg. chimpanzees

selection, k - fewer offspring, more parental care - usually in larger animals (within primates)

selection, R - shorter life span, more offspring born and more lost - smaller, terrestrial primates

sexual dimorphism - males and females look different - size, hair growth pattern, colour of fur, size of canines - terrestrial primates are reasonably sexually dimorphic in spider monkeys, females are bigger than males

silverback - mature male gorilla, usually only one in a group

social facilitation - when one animal does something and then everybody does it

sociobiology (contrast with behaviourist) - behaviour is based on a determined genetic background - eg. altruistic, infant care, aggressive behaviours

sociosexual behaviour - genital-genital rubbing between males and between females, juveniles and infants engaging in sex - eg. bonobos

territoriality - defending area against others of same species

tool use - modify shape of what you' re using to fulfill a function better - eg. chimpanzees using sticks to get termites and ants

vervets - multi-multi groups - eat figs, fruit, new leaves, flowers, insects, bark, gum, grass, corms, roots - cheek pouches - males protect group (lots of enemies) - use bipedal posture to look around

Notes � Leila

Hockett - 13 features common to all language/communication system

Acheson - 10

Washoe � doll fell in her lap, �baby in my cup� � spontaneous, creative use of language

fridge

is ASL language?

discrete units/words?

Washoe teach daughter

Points

lying as a sufficient condition for language???

surely a bogus distress call (crying wolf) is a �lie�, yet a distress call doesn�t constitute a language

might human children have the advantage of listening to language even in the womb???

if Kanzi�s three word utterances consistently used the agent-action-recipient word order structure, that would be syntax

children do have an LAD of some description, and it may be that the way chimps learn is not just slower, but follows a different path in some way

Questions

what are the implications for specifically linguistic speech perception if chimps can clearly understand quite a lot of human spoken language (given simplified speech and certain contextual/non-verbal clues)