Aping Language

Themes in the Social Sciences

by Joel Wallman

This book is a critique of the experiments of recent years that tried to teach language to apes. The achievements of these animals are compared with the natural development of language, both spoken and signed forms, in children. It is argued that the apes in these studies acquired merely crude simulations of language rather than language itself and that there is no good evidence that apes can acquire a language. A survey of the communication systems of apes and monkeys in nature finds that these systems differ from language in profound ways--language is a uniquely human attribute.

Genres: Science

204 pages, Hardcover

First published October 15, 1992

Reviews

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

A CRITICAL PERSPECTIVE OF THE RESULTS OF THE ‘APE LANGUAGE’ EXPERIMENTS

Author Joel Wallman wrote in the Introduction to this 1992 book, “This book is about the experiments carried out over the past two decades in which it was attempted to impart a language, either natural or invented, to an ape. The debate engendered by these projects has been of interest---consuming for some, passing for others---to all of those whose concerns include the enduring questions of human nature, among them anthropologists, psychologists, linguists, biologists, and philosophers. An adequate treatment of the linguistic capabilities of apes entails consideration of a number of related issues, each of which is an interesting problem in its own right. Continuities in primate mentality, the relationship between language and thought in the individual and in the species, and the origin of language in, again, both the ontogenetic and the phylogenetic senses, are themes that will recur through this work… The method followed in this book is one of detailed… critical analysis of the experimental methods and conclusions of the ape-language projects. The analysis is based on data summaries, published anecdotes, and experimenters’ conclusions---in short, on published material rather than on primary data.” (Pg. 3)

He continues, “This problem of defining features is more severe where the language of the young child is concerned, and it is the child’s language that is taken by most parties to the debate to be the proper material for comparison with the apes. If the young child is not, in fact, capable of linguistically encoding anything she can think of, if her production and understanding of utterances do not suggest abstract grammatical constituents and processes, then can it be said that the child has language? … [Some researchers] would say no. This is a defensible position, its major problem found in the fact that the young child’s language, which may not yet be language, will eventually become language.

“How is this discontinuity to be bridged? The discontinuity is not the existence of a discontinuity per se---there are a number of others in human development.; The physiological transition from prepubescence to pubescence, for example, poses a similar problem---the two developmental phases are identifiably distinct, yet there are no two adjacent points in time about which it could be said that the child was prepubescent in the first but not pubescent in the second… Language, in summary, is central to our self-definition as a species, even though we have yet to derive an adequate definition of language itself, one that includes the essential but excludes the merely contingent.” (Pg. 6-7)

He states, “The assessments of Lana’s performance by the Lana researchers take a strong form of the tendency among ape-language researchers to overinterpret their animals’ behavior in the direction of human language, elevating to linguistic status behavior more cogently explained in simpler terms. Lana’s ‘sentences’ provide a good example. It is clear that most of Lana’s sentences were learned as rote sequences of key presses, yet [some researchers] gloss each lexigram within them with an English word. The inappropriateness of this practice is most clearly seen in the rendering of the request indicator as ‘please’ (for example ‘please machine give apple’). Not only is there no evidence to suggest that Lana had any notion of the meaning of ‘please’ or even a child’s rudimentary understanding of the sociolinguistic rules governing its usage, but there is also little reason to believe that the other, more concrete terms were meaningful for her either… Lana did come to respond reliably to inquiries about the names of items presented to her, although we are not told just how general this ability was within the category of things nor whether the lexigrams for actions and prepositions were meaningful for her.” (Pg. 31)

He continues, “The color coding of Lana’s lexigrams according to semantic category undercuts the presumption that each of her lexigrams had a distinct meaning for her… it is plausible that Lana used it… instead of learning to compose sentences of individually meaningful terms, she might have learned merely a finite number of color sequences that reliably resulted in a reward.” (Pg. 33)

Turning to the chimp Nim, he reports, “a meticulous analysis … of Nim’s sign-training sessions … found that nearly 40 percent of Nim’s utterances were complete or partial imitations of what the teacher had just signed. In addition, some 50 percent of Nim’s utterances were begun while his teacher was still signing, suggesting that he was not conversing but rather producing signs in a constant effort to secure desired objects or activities. This stands in striking contrast to the conversational performance of children.” (Pg. 87)

He notes, “The coining of ‘novel combinations’ was seen by the apes’ teachers as cogent evidence that their animals were generating phrase when they signed. Washoe’s apparent reference to a swan as a ‘water bird’ is the most famous such utterance… was Washoe referring to ‘a bird of the water’ or simply mentioning or responding to water and bird in succession?” (Pg. 96)

He explains, “I do not believe that any of the ape-language projects succeeded in instilling even a degenerate version of a human language in an ape. There are no pervasive data in support of syntactic patterning. At best, one or more of the animals in these studies acquired an ability, or enhanced an inchoate one, to represent things with symbols. However, the evidence for even this capacity, a prerequisite for syntactic productivity, is equivocal.” (Pg. 109)

He adds, “no appreciable differences in the accomplishments of these animals are apparent after a critical assessment of the evidence. The problem, it seems, lies with the students, not their teachers.” (Pg. 110)

He states, “To be sure, the independence of language from other intellectual capacities can be exaggerated… transplanting the neurological apparatus of language into a chicken would not produce a talking chicken. And the language of the retarded child, while recognizably akin to normal language, is undeniably affected by her deficiencies in the relatively nonlinguistic intellectual abilities. Clearly, in ANY species, the language faculty must be supplemented by a certain level of functioning in other mental domains for manifestation of normal language. What appears to be the case is that the ape is competent in some or all of the collateral areas but devoid of a language faculty.” (Pg. 112)

He concludes, “The ape-language experiments confirmed what students … have repeatedly demonstrated, which is that apes are highly intelligent creatures, probably second only to us, on measures of human intelligence… the cognitive prowess of the apes is a fact regardless of our inability to account for it. That the apes, too, are reflexive and capable of impressively abstract mentation suggests that at least a modest version of these faculties arose before the ancestral hominid lineage diversified into the African apes on the one hand and us on the other… If the capacity for language, too, had arisen prior to that last hominoid divergence, then linguistics might have been a branch of comparative psychology, the ape-language experiments would never have been conceived, and this book would have been about something else. But, for that matter, had language arisen prior to the split that produced them and us---had we all spoken the same language—there might not have been a them and us.” (Pg. 153)

This book will appeal to those seeking critiques of the ape language experiments.

[Beckie · Rating 3 out of 5]

i watched a documentary about koko the gorilla last year that seemed to show very convincingly that koko could communicate in sign language. i read a more sceptical discussion of the ability of great apes to learn language somewhere recently, though (i forget where, unfortunately), and somebody recommended this book. it's a review of all the ape language studies (before the 1990s, when the book was written, at least) and is very critical of the experimental design and analysis. it also reviews some of the literature on language development in children, in order to compare the two fields. the author does not believe that non-human apes have the capacity for language and does a thorough job of rebutting the claims to the contrary by showing that the use of signs or symbols can be explained as conditioned responses, rather than meaningful communication. it took me a while to start reading, because it is rather technical, but i found it very interesting.

[Nat]

Reading critical studies of experimental results is enjoyable in the same way as reading literary criticism. As Tom Townsend puts it in Metropolitan, "this way you get both the [experimenter's] ideas as well as the critic's thinking". Wallman works through the major ape language studies (through the early 90s) and makes a convincing case that they show much much less than the experimenters themselves take them to show. He summarizes his conclusions as follows:

"I should state that I do not believe that any of the ape-language projects succeeded in instilling even a degenerate version of a human language in an ape. There are no persuasive data in support of syntactic patterning. At best, one or more of the animals in these studies acquired an ability, or enhanced an inchoate one, to represent things with symbols. However, the evidence for even this capacity, a prerequisite for syntactic productivity, is equivocal" (p.109).

As interesting as the ape studies are, I am glad that my research does not require listening to recordings of agonistic monkey screams (p.135).

[Zedder · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the definitive survey of ape language studies up until the early 1990's. Anyone interested in animal cognition should read it.