Kanzi: The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh
Authors: Sue Savage-Rumbaugh
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Clever Hans Conference. We concluded the paper with the following: “Experimenters must stop looking for superficial similarities between apes and children and must instead investigate the cognitive competencies that underlie symbolic processes.” 13 That was precisely where the project with Sherman and Austin would take us.
3
Talking to Each Other
Sherman and Austin were two and a half and one and a half years old, respectively, when the Animal Model Project commenced, in June of 1975. The primary goal of the project was to elucidate the processes of language acquisition in apes and compare them with the phenomenon of spontaneous language acquisition in human children. This goal encompassed practical and theoretical issues. First, it continued and extended the effort to develop language-training techniques that might help severely mentally retarded children. Duane had initiated that endeavor at the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center in 1970, with the Lana project. Second, it asked,
in what sense
can a species other than
Homo sapiens
develop language?
The unease I had experienced over the strong claims for language competence in the chimpanzees I was most familiar with—Washoe, Lucy, and Lana—encouraged me to guide the investigation with Sherman and Austin in a very different direction. The goal of most researchers in the field had been to determine whether apes
have
language, in much the same way as you might determine whether they have a thumb or a stomach. As we saw earlier, it was expected that if apes do have language, its presence would be revealed by the animals’ innate syntactical competence, a putatively genetically determined ability to order the symbols in multiword utterances.
My goal was at once to be more modest and more ambitious than seeking signs of syntax: I planned to focus on words, notsentences. More specifically, I was interested in the animals’ ability to comprehend and communicate. I had no ambitions to instill in Sherman and Austin an impressively extensive vocabulary. Nor would I spend time encouraging multisymbol utterances. Instead, I was reaching beyond these staples of ape-language research, seeking to touch the essence of language: the ability to tell another individual something he or she did not already know. I wanted Sherman and Austin to use symbols referentially with each other, in true, humanlike communication.
The journey toward that goal turned out to be longer and more arduous than I had expected, and at every step of the way I encountered problems, primarily because of unsubstantiated assumptions I made about what Sherman and Austin would be able to do as we progressed. I came away from the experience—one I felt I had jointly shared with Sherman and Austin—with a better understanding of the nature of language and its acquisition. The results of the project also advanced ape-language research in a fundamentally conceptual manner.
The unfolding of the Animal Model Project happened to parallel in time the rising fomentation over the validity of ape-language research, which I described in Chapter 2 . By the time Herbert Terrace published his influential
Science
paper, in November 1979, and the Clever Hans Conference of the New York Academy of Sciences had taken place, in May 1980, Sherman and Austin had achieved a level of language competence—in the sense of true symbolic communication—that far surpassed that of any of the apes so frequently cited by both proponents and opponents of ape-language research. I had been working with them for five years at that point. Ironically, because I had eschewed syntax as a goal in my project, Sherman and Austin received not even as much as a footnote in the debate.
From the very beginning, the two chimps were very different from each other. Sherman was, and has remained, the physically bigger of the two. Partly as a result of this, Sherman has theability to be the dominant individual whenever he chooses. Just as striking,
3
Talking to Each Other
Sherman and Austin were two and a half and one and a half years old, respectively, when the Animal Model Project commenced, in June of 1975. The primary goal of the project was to elucidate the processes of language acquisition in apes and compare them with the phenomenon of spontaneous language acquisition in human children. This goal encompassed practical and theoretical issues. First, it continued and extended the effort to develop language-training techniques that might help severely mentally retarded children. Duane had initiated that endeavor at the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center in 1970, with the Lana project. Second, it asked,
in what sense
can a species other than
Homo sapiens
develop language?
The unease I had experienced over the strong claims for language competence in the chimpanzees I was most familiar with—Washoe, Lucy, and Lana—encouraged me to guide the investigation with Sherman and Austin in a very different direction. The goal of most researchers in the field had been to determine whether apes
have
language, in much the same way as you might determine whether they have a thumb or a stomach. As we saw earlier, it was expected that if apes do have language, its presence would be revealed by the animals’ innate syntactical competence, a putatively genetically determined ability to order the symbols in multiword utterances.
My goal was at once to be more modest and more ambitious than seeking signs of syntax: I planned to focus on words, notsentences. More specifically, I was interested in the animals’ ability to comprehend and communicate. I had no ambitions to instill in Sherman and Austin an impressively extensive vocabulary. Nor would I spend time encouraging multisymbol utterances. Instead, I was reaching beyond these staples of ape-language research, seeking to touch the essence of language: the ability to tell another individual something he or she did not already know. I wanted Sherman and Austin to use symbols referentially with each other, in true, humanlike communication.
The journey toward that goal turned out to be longer and more arduous than I had expected, and at every step of the way I encountered problems, primarily because of unsubstantiated assumptions I made about what Sherman and Austin would be able to do as we progressed. I came away from the experience—one I felt I had jointly shared with Sherman and Austin—with a better understanding of the nature of language and its acquisition. The results of the project also advanced ape-language research in a fundamentally conceptual manner.
The unfolding of the Animal Model Project happened to parallel in time the rising fomentation over the validity of ape-language research, which I described in Chapter 2 . By the time Herbert Terrace published his influential
Science
paper, in November 1979, and the Clever Hans Conference of the New York Academy of Sciences had taken place, in May 1980, Sherman and Austin had achieved a level of language competence—in the sense of true symbolic communication—that far surpassed that of any of the apes so frequently cited by both proponents and opponents of ape-language research. I had been working with them for five years at that point. Ironically, because I had eschewed syntax as a goal in my project, Sherman and Austin received not even as much as a footnote in the debate.
From the very beginning, the two chimps were very different from each other. Sherman was, and has remained, the physically bigger of the two. Partly as a result of this, Sherman has theability to be the dominant individual whenever he chooses. Just as striking,
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