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Leonard Hastings Schoff Lectures
Why Chimpanzees Can't Learn Language and Only Humans Can
In the 1970s, the behavioral psychologist Herbert S. Terrace led a remarkable experiment to see if a chimpanzee could be taught to use language. A young ape, named "Nim Chimpsky" in a nod to the linguist whose theories Terrace challenged, was raised by a family in New York and instructed in American Sign Language. Initially, Terrace thought that Nim could create sentences but later discovered that Nim's teachers inadvertently cued his signing. Terrace concluded that Project Nim failed--not because Nim couldn't create sentences but because he couldn't even learn words. Language is a uniquely human quality, and attempting to find it in animals is wishful thinking at best. The failure of Project Nim meant we were no closer to understanding where language comes from.
In this book, Terrace revisits Project Nim to offer a novel view of the origins of human language. In contrast to both Noam Chomsky and his critics, Terrace contends that words, as much as grammar, are the cornerstones of language. Retracing human evolution and developmental psychology, he shows that nonverbal interaction is the foundation of infant language acquisition, leading up to a child's first words. By placing words and conversation before grammar, we can, for the first time, account for the evolutionary basis of language. Terrace argues that this theory explains Nim's inability to acquire words and, more broadly, the differences between human and animal communication. Why Chimpanzees Can't Learn Language and Only Humans Can is a masterful statement of the nature of language and what it means to be human.
In this book, Terrace revisits Project Nim to offer a novel view of the origins of human language. In contrast to both Noam Chomsky and his critics, Terrace contends that words, as much as grammar, are the cornerstones of language. Retracing human evolution and developmental psychology, he shows that nonverbal interaction is the foundation of infant language acquisition, leading up to a child's first words. By placing words and conversation before grammar, we can, for the first time, account for the evolutionary basis of language. Terrace argues that this theory explains Nim's inability to acquire words and, more broadly, the differences between human and animal communication. Why Chimpanzees Can't Learn Language and Only Humans Can is a masterful statement of the nature of language and what it means to be human.
248 pages, Hardcover
First published October 1, 2019
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July 19, 2022
When I was growing up in the 1980s, a staple belief of socially-correct thinking was that many non-human animals, not only apes but also dolphins, whales, and elephants, had, if we could only understand, minds functionally indistinguishable from ours. Children were told constantly about Koko the gorilla, who could supposedly speak, albeit in sign language. But all this was false, part of the Left project to convince us mankind is nothing special. Herbert Terrace, who has devoted his entire career to ape cognition, here puts the spike into the lies of my childhood, demonstrating that no ape (or any animal, primate or otherwise) can communicate in any way similar to humans.
This is really a book in two parts, each of which could stand on its own. The first part shows, through the author’s own experimental knowledge, that apes cannot learn language. They cannot communicate with sentences—that is, they completely lack the ability to string words together using syntax, a grammar. More surprisingly, perhaps, apes also lack the even more basic ability to use words at all, because they cannot understand that words have meaning. The second part of the book is Terrace’s theory of how humans, in contrast, did acquire language. This part is more speculative, though interesting enough in its own right.
During the first half of the twentieth century, the mainstream position was that apes could not communicate with humans only because they could not articulate words. Experimenters therefore tried techniques such as manually manipulating a chimpanzee’s mouth into positions designed to encourage articulation. Then, in the 1960s, researchers hit upon teaching apes sign language, and then argued that combinations of signs made by apes constituted sentences. The most famous example of this is the claim that a chimpanzee, Washoe, signed “water bird” when she saw a swan, and that this combination was a sentence.
Terrace, a behavioral psychologist by training and a student of the famous B. F. Skinner, and in the early 1970s a young up-and-comer, was familiar with Washoe, and himself completely agreed with mainstream opinion about ape communication. He wanted to make ape language experiments more robust (and no doubt to make a name for himself). In 1973, Terrace therefore began a new experiment, one where an ape would be taught from birth, since earlier experiments had used mature apes, and one where all teaching interactions would be documented with videotape, since none existed for Washoe or other prior ape experiments.
There is more background to Terrace’s experiment, however. He wanted to resolve a scientific dispute that reached far beyond the use of language by apes. At the time, an argument raged between Skinner and Noam Chomsky, who has had a long career as perhaps the most famous scholar of human language formation, along with his parallel career as an Israel-hating Commie. Skinner believed language was psychological in basis, the result of conditioning, which would suggest apes could be taught. Chomsky believed, and pioneered the idea, that language was innate and biological, and limited to humans.
Skinner created the field of “instrumental conditioning,” where new behaviors became associated with arbitrary stimuli, through the technique of reward (as opposed to Pavlov’s dog, where only old behaviors were generated, though through new stimuli). In 1957 he wrote Verbal Behavior, in which “he argued that language was simply a collection of verbal habits that children learned by trial and error and/or by imitating their caretakers’ utterances.” Language was therefore merely conditioned responses.
In 1959, Chomsky savaged Verbal Behavior, pointing out several crucial areas of language that Skinner’s theory could not explain, including an infinite number of meanings from a finite vocabulary and the existence of grammatically correct but meaningless sentences (contra Skinner’s claim that what mattered most was the relationship between words next to each other). Most of all, Chomsky pointed to demonstrated rapid development of language by children using none of the mechanisms by which Skinner said children learned. Chomsky claimed not only that language was biological, an innate feature limited to humans, but that there was no Darwinian explanation for the evolutionary development of human language. Rather, he argued that humans have a neural component, unique to our species, a genetic quirk suddenly developed a mere 80,000 years ago, that allows us to learn language. He called this our “Language Acquisition Device.” In short, human language sprang fully-formed into being; its existence was not the result of evolution or any type of learned behavior.
In 1972, Terrace set out to rebut Chomsky, by conducting an experiment with a chimpanzee, whom he named Nim Chimpsky. (He chose the name as a slap against Chomsky.) This was the most ambitious experiment to date, an attempt to raise an infant chimpanzee as a human. “If I could teach Nim to produce sentences in sign language, I would have refuted Chomsky’s review that only humans could learn language. Specifically, I would have shown that the ability to create new meanings by combining words—an ability that Chomsky claimed was the defining feature of language—could be found in another species.”
It appears that Terrace wrote this book late in his life (he was born in 1936, and published this book in 2019), in response to a hit-piece on him. In 2011, James Marsh (who had earlier released the better-known Man on Wire), released a documentary, Project Nim. Terrace says the film ignores the science and is merely an ad hominem attack on him. I haven’t seen it, though from descriptions it does ignore the science and is tendentious, treacly emotional manipulation, based on the assumption Nim deserved to be treated no different than a human being. What Terrace doesn’t mention, however, is that he apparently made a regular practice of sleeping with attractive young female researchers on the project. No doubt much of the animosity and resentment on display from others in the film sprang from that, or from other negative personal attributes Terrace displayed.
Anyway, at first, after assembling many hours of footage and Nim learning scores of symbols (that is, shown an object, he was taught to make a sign for it), Terrace concluded that the experiment had definitively shown what he wanted to show. He was reviewing videotapes, about to, in 1978, publish a paper arguing that he had confirmed Nim could “speak” in simple sentences. To his shock, he suddenly realized that he was completely wrong—Nim could not generate any sentences at all. All Nim ever produced was “a sequence of prompted signs, [never] a spontaneous sentence.” In other words, Nim’s “sentences,” his “grammar,” were a modern example of the Clever Hans effect—the nineteenth-century German horse which supposedly could count, but was merely reacting to subtle, unconscious cues given to him by his trainers.
Digging deeper into the videotape, Terrace discovered that Nim could associate words (and other lexigrams) with objects, but only in order to get rewards, and without even any understanding that those words were names. Nim wasn’t signing to name objects, much less combining signs to create new meanings from words. He was signing to obtain a reward, and the signs that he needed to sign to get that reward were always prompted by the “teacher.” The combinations of signs were meaningless.
This was not the conclusion Terrace wanted, but in those days, when science was less corrupt, and scientism had not largely replaced science, he naturally felt compelled to publish his unpopular results. It’s not that Terrace became a Chomsky fanboy, though. He decided Chomsky was wrong, in part—because he ignored that words necessarily precede grammar, something to which he turns in the second part of this book.
Before we get there, Terrace addresses various criticisms of his conclusions as regards Nim, and the capabilities of apes more generally. He specifically rebuts later experiments testing ape language where the experimenters claim contrary results (though few later experiments have been done), such as experiments begun in the 1980s with a bonobo named Kanzi. He shows that there, just as with Nim, sequences that appear to be sentences are merely rote learnings to obtain a reward—all things that dogs can do as well as apes. Terrace claims that despite decades of his challenging his critics, no scientist has produced any recorded example of a non-prompted ape signing a “sentence.” All apes do is use imperatives to obtain a reward, the result of behavioral conditioning. They never use words “declaratively: that is, conversationally.” Both language and words are strictly human.
The animal world is just different. The sounds animals make are instinctual, not conversation. Birdsongs, for example, do not change; all animal sounds (and other communicative actions, such as bee dances) are immutable, and are very limited in number in all species. Responses animals make to stimuli, whether words, sounds, or other (such as “Fetch!”) show comprehension, but not production, of words. Adog does not associate “Fetch” with anything other than a reward; he has no concept of “fetching,” or for that matter “ball,” or anything else as a name.
Terrace is not without his present-day critics; the vile Peter Singer is one of them. These critics make vague claims such as that apes must absorb language if raised in a family-type environment (as Nim was), without any proof or even evidence. For Singer, of course, the need to deny what Terrace found is ideological, because Singer’s main claim to fame is rejecting that humans are unique (which is why he advocates for infanticide and for granting rights to animals). Judging from the hand-waving responses his critics offer to points Terrace has made consistently for decades, along with the emotional/ideological freight his critics invariably display, and their inability to point to any reason why Terrace would falsely argue that Nim could not speak (as Terrace points out, he’d be a lot more famous if he had found that Nim could communicate with language), it seems pretty clear that Terrace is right about ape inability to use language, and his critics are wrong.
Then Terrace switches gears, to talk about “Recent Human Ancestors and the Possible Origin of Words.” By “recent,” he means within the past six million years, roughly when we are supposed to have diverged from chimpanzees, and since when quite a few species under the genus homo have existed on this planet. Terrace’s aim is to, using paleoanthropology, sift members on the human family tree and try to figure out which one developed language, due to “brainpower and the necessary environmental pressure.” He settles on homo erectus.
Terrace’s purpose is to give a plausible evolutionary theory of words. He leaves vague exactly how he thinks this production of words resulted in grammar, and thus complete language. He does not reject Chomsky’s belief in a “Universal Grammar,” but he thinks it could have been a gradual process, and in any case dependent on the earlier origin of words (Chomsky thought how words came about was a “mystery”). That is, Terrace argues that language, a whole language, can develop evolutionarily, incrementally, if one recognizes that words are “a separate stage in the evolution of language.” Terrace claims that millions of years ago words gave an new evolutionary advantage to homo erectus, in order to engage in “confrontational scavenging,” collecting friends to beat off other predators from carrion. This required “an unprecedented degree of cooperation and trust that would allow sharing of mental events,” and words were what made this possible. Sure, maybe, I guess.
How did words come to exist at all, in order to then confer evolutionary advantage? Terrace builds on the generally-agreed theory that bipedalism, and a consequent reduction in pelvis size, combined with an increase in human brain size, resulted in human children being born more dependent on their mothers than other primates. They must be cradled for six months, whereas other primates can crawl around within a month. Terrace proposes that it is this cradling stage, in which mother and infant regard each other and the world around them, sharing joint attention with respect to external objects, that created words.
Only humans cradle. Cradling means the mother and her child’s eyes are close together—they share each other’s gaze, called “intersubjectivity.” From immediately after birth, mother and child engage in a complex interaction, in which the child imitates the mother, and vice versa, sharing affect. This leads to “joint attention,” where they share perceptions of objects in the world other than mother or child, with their intersubjectivity making it possible for them to communicate they are seeing the same object. (This is different from “gaze following,” which does happen in other species.) This leads to the ability to “share intentionality,” that is, to cooperate. (Apes cannot cooperate or share to achieve joint objectives.) From this flow words, to name the subjects of joint attention—such as free meat, making this capability useful in a Darwinian context.
Words are voluntary and flexible, with direct cognitive effect aimed at sharing information, including gradations of emotion unknown in animals. It is “social engagement” with the mother, followed by other forms of social engagement as the infant matures and moves beyond cradling, that drives the creation of words in every individual. Words are not innate—as shown by that neglected children in orphanages, and the autistic, do not properly develop words. If cradling stops, so do words.
I suppose this theory is plausible, though I claim no expertise. I don’t think it really matters for the world if we know how humans developed language. (If Chomsky is right, maybe the granting of language to men was when God divided Adam from the animals.) I do note that Terrace is an old man, otherwise he would realize this entire line of thought is forbidden, because the idea that the mother is something different to an infant than the father is heretical. (He’s at least aware enough of this, or his editors were, to drop an endnote ludicrously claiming that by “mother” he really means “all of an infant’s caretakers.”)
There is no reason to conduct more experiments like Project Nim; we already have the answers. We should realize and acknowledge that animals are sentient, but also recognize that they are qualitatively different from men. We should neither use animals as substitute children (a sad product of modernity) or abuse animals. Misplaced love and cruelty are both vices. Rather, we should exercise our dominion over animals with recognition that each animal is different, and that we owe different duties to it as a result. Yes to killing the mosquito; no to killing the gorilla or the elephant—not because they can talk to us, or think like us, but because we should only kill, or harm, sentient beings with good reason, and the higher the sentience, the better the reason needs to be.
This is really a book in two parts, each of which could stand on its own. The first part shows, through the author’s own experimental knowledge, that apes cannot learn language. They cannot communicate with sentences—that is, they completely lack the ability to string words together using syntax, a grammar. More surprisingly, perhaps, apes also lack the even more basic ability to use words at all, because they cannot understand that words have meaning. The second part of the book is Terrace’s theory of how humans, in contrast, did acquire language. This part is more speculative, though interesting enough in its own right.
During the first half of the twentieth century, the mainstream position was that apes could not communicate with humans only because they could not articulate words. Experimenters therefore tried techniques such as manually manipulating a chimpanzee’s mouth into positions designed to encourage articulation. Then, in the 1960s, researchers hit upon teaching apes sign language, and then argued that combinations of signs made by apes constituted sentences. The most famous example of this is the claim that a chimpanzee, Washoe, signed “water bird” when she saw a swan, and that this combination was a sentence.
Terrace, a behavioral psychologist by training and a student of the famous B. F. Skinner, and in the early 1970s a young up-and-comer, was familiar with Washoe, and himself completely agreed with mainstream opinion about ape communication. He wanted to make ape language experiments more robust (and no doubt to make a name for himself). In 1973, Terrace therefore began a new experiment, one where an ape would be taught from birth, since earlier experiments had used mature apes, and one where all teaching interactions would be documented with videotape, since none existed for Washoe or other prior ape experiments.
There is more background to Terrace’s experiment, however. He wanted to resolve a scientific dispute that reached far beyond the use of language by apes. At the time, an argument raged between Skinner and Noam Chomsky, who has had a long career as perhaps the most famous scholar of human language formation, along with his parallel career as an Israel-hating Commie. Skinner believed language was psychological in basis, the result of conditioning, which would suggest apes could be taught. Chomsky believed, and pioneered the idea, that language was innate and biological, and limited to humans.
Skinner created the field of “instrumental conditioning,” where new behaviors became associated with arbitrary stimuli, through the technique of reward (as opposed to Pavlov’s dog, where only old behaviors were generated, though through new stimuli). In 1957 he wrote Verbal Behavior, in which “he argued that language was simply a collection of verbal habits that children learned by trial and error and/or by imitating their caretakers’ utterances.” Language was therefore merely conditioned responses.
In 1959, Chomsky savaged Verbal Behavior, pointing out several crucial areas of language that Skinner’s theory could not explain, including an infinite number of meanings from a finite vocabulary and the existence of grammatically correct but meaningless sentences (contra Skinner’s claim that what mattered most was the relationship between words next to each other). Most of all, Chomsky pointed to demonstrated rapid development of language by children using none of the mechanisms by which Skinner said children learned. Chomsky claimed not only that language was biological, an innate feature limited to humans, but that there was no Darwinian explanation for the evolutionary development of human language. Rather, he argued that humans have a neural component, unique to our species, a genetic quirk suddenly developed a mere 80,000 years ago, that allows us to learn language. He called this our “Language Acquisition Device.” In short, human language sprang fully-formed into being; its existence was not the result of evolution or any type of learned behavior.
In 1972, Terrace set out to rebut Chomsky, by conducting an experiment with a chimpanzee, whom he named Nim Chimpsky. (He chose the name as a slap against Chomsky.) This was the most ambitious experiment to date, an attempt to raise an infant chimpanzee as a human. “If I could teach Nim to produce sentences in sign language, I would have refuted Chomsky’s review that only humans could learn language. Specifically, I would have shown that the ability to create new meanings by combining words—an ability that Chomsky claimed was the defining feature of language—could be found in another species.”
It appears that Terrace wrote this book late in his life (he was born in 1936, and published this book in 2019), in response to a hit-piece on him. In 2011, James Marsh (who had earlier released the better-known Man on Wire), released a documentary, Project Nim. Terrace says the film ignores the science and is merely an ad hominem attack on him. I haven’t seen it, though from descriptions it does ignore the science and is tendentious, treacly emotional manipulation, based on the assumption Nim deserved to be treated no different than a human being. What Terrace doesn’t mention, however, is that he apparently made a regular practice of sleeping with attractive young female researchers on the project. No doubt much of the animosity and resentment on display from others in the film sprang from that, or from other negative personal attributes Terrace displayed.
Anyway, at first, after assembling many hours of footage and Nim learning scores of symbols (that is, shown an object, he was taught to make a sign for it), Terrace concluded that the experiment had definitively shown what he wanted to show. He was reviewing videotapes, about to, in 1978, publish a paper arguing that he had confirmed Nim could “speak” in simple sentences. To his shock, he suddenly realized that he was completely wrong—Nim could not generate any sentences at all. All Nim ever produced was “a sequence of prompted signs, [never] a spontaneous sentence.” In other words, Nim’s “sentences,” his “grammar,” were a modern example of the Clever Hans effect—the nineteenth-century German horse which supposedly could count, but was merely reacting to subtle, unconscious cues given to him by his trainers.
Digging deeper into the videotape, Terrace discovered that Nim could associate words (and other lexigrams) with objects, but only in order to get rewards, and without even any understanding that those words were names. Nim wasn’t signing to name objects, much less combining signs to create new meanings from words. He was signing to obtain a reward, and the signs that he needed to sign to get that reward were always prompted by the “teacher.” The combinations of signs were meaningless.
This was not the conclusion Terrace wanted, but in those days, when science was less corrupt, and scientism had not largely replaced science, he naturally felt compelled to publish his unpopular results. It’s not that Terrace became a Chomsky fanboy, though. He decided Chomsky was wrong, in part—because he ignored that words necessarily precede grammar, something to which he turns in the second part of this book.
Before we get there, Terrace addresses various criticisms of his conclusions as regards Nim, and the capabilities of apes more generally. He specifically rebuts later experiments testing ape language where the experimenters claim contrary results (though few later experiments have been done), such as experiments begun in the 1980s with a bonobo named Kanzi. He shows that there, just as with Nim, sequences that appear to be sentences are merely rote learnings to obtain a reward—all things that dogs can do as well as apes. Terrace claims that despite decades of his challenging his critics, no scientist has produced any recorded example of a non-prompted ape signing a “sentence.” All apes do is use imperatives to obtain a reward, the result of behavioral conditioning. They never use words “declaratively: that is, conversationally.” Both language and words are strictly human.
The animal world is just different. The sounds animals make are instinctual, not conversation. Birdsongs, for example, do not change; all animal sounds (and other communicative actions, such as bee dances) are immutable, and are very limited in number in all species. Responses animals make to stimuli, whether words, sounds, or other (such as “Fetch!”) show comprehension, but not production, of words. Adog does not associate “Fetch” with anything other than a reward; he has no concept of “fetching,” or for that matter “ball,” or anything else as a name.
Terrace is not without his present-day critics; the vile Peter Singer is one of them. These critics make vague claims such as that apes must absorb language if raised in a family-type environment (as Nim was), without any proof or even evidence. For Singer, of course, the need to deny what Terrace found is ideological, because Singer’s main claim to fame is rejecting that humans are unique (which is why he advocates for infanticide and for granting rights to animals). Judging from the hand-waving responses his critics offer to points Terrace has made consistently for decades, along with the emotional/ideological freight his critics invariably display, and their inability to point to any reason why Terrace would falsely argue that Nim could not speak (as Terrace points out, he’d be a lot more famous if he had found that Nim could communicate with language), it seems pretty clear that Terrace is right about ape inability to use language, and his critics are wrong.
Then Terrace switches gears, to talk about “Recent Human Ancestors and the Possible Origin of Words.” By “recent,” he means within the past six million years, roughly when we are supposed to have diverged from chimpanzees, and since when quite a few species under the genus homo have existed on this planet. Terrace’s aim is to, using paleoanthropology, sift members on the human family tree and try to figure out which one developed language, due to “brainpower and the necessary environmental pressure.” He settles on homo erectus.
Terrace’s purpose is to give a plausible evolutionary theory of words. He leaves vague exactly how he thinks this production of words resulted in grammar, and thus complete language. He does not reject Chomsky’s belief in a “Universal Grammar,” but he thinks it could have been a gradual process, and in any case dependent on the earlier origin of words (Chomsky thought how words came about was a “mystery”). That is, Terrace argues that language, a whole language, can develop evolutionarily, incrementally, if one recognizes that words are “a separate stage in the evolution of language.” Terrace claims that millions of years ago words gave an new evolutionary advantage to homo erectus, in order to engage in “confrontational scavenging,” collecting friends to beat off other predators from carrion. This required “an unprecedented degree of cooperation and trust that would allow sharing of mental events,” and words were what made this possible. Sure, maybe, I guess.
How did words come to exist at all, in order to then confer evolutionary advantage? Terrace builds on the generally-agreed theory that bipedalism, and a consequent reduction in pelvis size, combined with an increase in human brain size, resulted in human children being born more dependent on their mothers than other primates. They must be cradled for six months, whereas other primates can crawl around within a month. Terrace proposes that it is this cradling stage, in which mother and infant regard each other and the world around them, sharing joint attention with respect to external objects, that created words.
Only humans cradle. Cradling means the mother and her child’s eyes are close together—they share each other’s gaze, called “intersubjectivity.” From immediately after birth, mother and child engage in a complex interaction, in which the child imitates the mother, and vice versa, sharing affect. This leads to “joint attention,” where they share perceptions of objects in the world other than mother or child, with their intersubjectivity making it possible for them to communicate they are seeing the same object. (This is different from “gaze following,” which does happen in other species.) This leads to the ability to “share intentionality,” that is, to cooperate. (Apes cannot cooperate or share to achieve joint objectives.) From this flow words, to name the subjects of joint attention—such as free meat, making this capability useful in a Darwinian context.
Words are voluntary and flexible, with direct cognitive effect aimed at sharing information, including gradations of emotion unknown in animals. It is “social engagement” with the mother, followed by other forms of social engagement as the infant matures and moves beyond cradling, that drives the creation of words in every individual. Words are not innate—as shown by that neglected children in orphanages, and the autistic, do not properly develop words. If cradling stops, so do words.
I suppose this theory is plausible, though I claim no expertise. I don’t think it really matters for the world if we know how humans developed language. (If Chomsky is right, maybe the granting of language to men was when God divided Adam from the animals.) I do note that Terrace is an old man, otherwise he would realize this entire line of thought is forbidden, because the idea that the mother is something different to an infant than the father is heretical. (He’s at least aware enough of this, or his editors were, to drop an endnote ludicrously claiming that by “mother” he really means “all of an infant’s caretakers.”)
There is no reason to conduct more experiments like Project Nim; we already have the answers. We should realize and acknowledge that animals are sentient, but also recognize that they are qualitatively different from men. We should neither use animals as substitute children (a sad product of modernity) or abuse animals. Misplaced love and cruelty are both vices. Rather, we should exercise our dominion over animals with recognition that each animal is different, and that we owe different duties to it as a result. Yes to killing the mosquito; no to killing the gorilla or the elephant—not because they can talk to us, or think like us, but because we should only kill, or harm, sentient beings with good reason, and the higher the sentience, the better the reason needs to be.
March 9, 2023
Dil insanın egosantrik bir yanı. Buna katılmamak çok zor çünkü daha kendi dil öğrenim sürecimizi anlamamışken tüm memelilerden farklı bir sistemimiz olduğuna kendimizi ikna da edebildiğimiz belki biraz körelmiş bir sinir sistemimiz var. Bu biraz duygusal bir eleştiri olabilir ama neden üstün olduğumuza dair keskin ön kabullerimiz olduğuna anlam veremiyorum. Evet şempanzeler dil öğrenemez. Tüm deneysel ortamın teorik çıktıları bu yönde. Ama bu kitabın peşine yazılması gereken bir kitap daha var. İnsanlar dil öğrenince ne oluyor? İnsanların başı diğer canlı başlarından farklı olarak göğe mi ermiş yoksa bu bir iluzyon mu? Öte yandan, dilin çözümlenme çabasını takdir ediyorum. Ama hayal gücümüzün keskin sınırları olduğunu da düşünüyorum.
December 18, 2019
This academic paper pusher reminds me with a smile of other nobodies in comfy sinecures. To keep it in the range of Human versus Chimpanzee: some were very offended when some guy said that Humans, the 6th day creature, were simply evolved from apes. No, that could not be possible. Among other characteristics that set Humans apart, apart from the Gospel that is, opposable thumbs, hairless body, upright walking, the use of tools, language. That's because in Europe there weren't any contenders. But meanwhile there are other animals with opposable thumbs or who can walk upright. The use of tools. Well, other animals use tools. So the Terrace-kind moved the goalposts: the making of tools. And when someone came with proof they unanimously decided: it's a fake. Now it's language that can't possibly be, and because it sets Humans apart, it is a relevant characteristic.
Or in short: if he needs it, Terrace would prove that making mashed potatoes is the element that sets Humans apart.
Or in short: if he needs it, Terrace would prove that making mashed potatoes is the element that sets Humans apart.
June 19, 2020
Why Chimpanzees Can't Learn Language and Only Humans Can is a very interesting and well-written book that revisits a remarkable 1970s behavioural experiment and surveys subsequent developments in linguistics, palaeoanthropology, and developmental psychology to offer a new understanding of how language evolved. See my full review at https://inquisitivebiologist.com/2020...
June 18, 2024
AN EXCELLENT EXTENSION OF HIS EARLIER BOOK, “NIM”
Herbert S. Terrace is a Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at Columbia University. He wrote in the Preface to this 2019 book, “This book is based on the William Schoff lectures I gave at Columbia University. The topic was the evolution of language, words in particular… My interest in the evolution of language began… when I tried to explain the failure of a project in which I attempted to teach sign language to a chimpanzee, Nim Chimpsky. When naming my chimpanzee, I was obviously expecting a positive outcome. If I could teach Nim to produce sentences in sign language, I would have refuted Chomsky’s view that only humans could learn language…. It turned out that Chomsky was right but for the wrong reason. Nim couldn’t learn sign language, not merely because he couldn’t pronounce sentences but because he couldn’t even learn words… I concluded that Nim and similarly trained chimpanzees could learn to use symbols, but only as a means to obtain particular rewards, such as food, drink, tickling, and so on. What they couldn’t learn was that things have names.” (Pg. ix-x)
He continues, “Little did I realize that Nim’s inability to learn language would ultimately lead me to recognize why he failed. This book summarizes some of those reasons… I examine Chomsky’s theory of language and show why, despite his claim otherwise, it doesn’t explain the evolution of language. I also show shy his theory is limited to language as it is currently used.” (Pg. xvi) Later, he adds, “The main purpose of this book is to draw attention to the significance of words, and how their origin was the first step toward language. By learning words, some ancestor was the first individual to name and refer to objects and to engage in conversation, all without grammar!” (Pg. 30)
He recounts, “To confirm the grammatical ability of a chimpanzee, I thought it was necessary to obtain what psycholinguists refer to as a ‘corpus,’ a collection of ALL the utterances a child makes and the circumstances under which they occurred… Within thirty months, members of Project Nim assembled a corpus of more than 20,000 combinations containing two or more of his signs. Initially, I thought the corpus provided enough evidence that a chimpanzee could create a sentence. But as I was about to publish my results, I made shocking discovery While watching a videotape of Nim signing with one of his teachers, I noticed that she inadvertently cued most of his signs… Instead of naming the objects with which he played, Nim signed merely to obtain a reward.” (Pg. xix)
He adds, “Shortly after Project Nim ended, developmental psychologists began to discover emotional and cognitive interactions between human infants and their mothers during an infant’s first year. Those interactions are necessary antecedent of an infant’s first words. Their absence in apes seems to be the best explanation of why they can’t language… apes were unable to learn language because they couldn’t learn that things have names.” (Pg. xxii)
There’s no evidence that a nonhuman animal can engage in conversation. The signals that animals use to communicate encompass a variety of physical dimensions… Superficially, it may seem that songbirds’ duets are conversational… [but a] songbird’s message doesn’t transmit any new information… However fascinating, such innate signals are few in number and rarely exceed thirty different types in a particular species. By contrast, human mothers and infants engages in dialogues that reflect how they each perceive the other’s emotional a mental state.” (Pg. 5-6)
He summarizes other ‘Ape Language Projects,’ and observes, “There was no evidence that chimpanzees knew the meaning of the signs they learned. Although they accumulated sizeable ‘vocabularies,’ video analyses of their signing and use of symbols show that they were motivated by rewards and not by sharing knowledge… None of the sequences that chimpanzees learned to produce required a linguistic explanation. In each instance, chimpanzees learned to use signs or symbols as imperative commands: that is, as a means of obtaining rewards they could not otherwise obtain. Although human language has imperatives… [t]he overwhelming majority of words are declarative, and their sole function is to share information.” (Pg. 21)
He recalls, “Why hadn’t I previously seen or noticed [Nim’s] teacher’s prompts? The reason was simple. Each time I watched a videotape of Nim signing, I thought I was watching a chimpanzee making history by conversing with a human. It was as if I were observing Nim through a telephoto lens… that allowed me to zoom in on his signs at the expense of any context… None of Nim’s teachers were aware of their prompting. They told me that Nim’s gesturing made it seem as if they were having a spontaneous conversation with him… Once I saw how Nim’s teachers contributed to his signing, I began to document what, to the unaided eye, gave the appearance of actual conversations… Initially, Nim tried to grab whatever reward the teacher brought with her. Because it was withheld, he occasionally signed all-purpose ‘wild card’ signs such as ‘me Nim’ or ‘hug.’ On most occasions, his teacher prompted him with appropriate signs, approximately 250 milliseconds before he signed.” (Pg. 42-43)
He acknowledges, “It is, of course, possible that my conclusions about a chimpanzee’s inability to learn language are wrong. It has been suggested, for example, that a project in which a chimpanzee was trained by a smaller group of fluent signers would yield more positive results. A few years after publishing my results, I stated that ‘my conclusions could be disproved by an unedited videotape in which the chimpanzee and its trainer were visible in each frame. That tape would reveal the extent to which the trainer prompted the chimp and whether it was given small rewards to motivate it to sign… More than thirty years later, I have yet to see any evidence that challenges my conclusions… its absence speaks volumes.” (Pg. 49-50)
Later, he suggests, “A major goal of paleoanthropology is to identify missing links of human descent. My goal in this chapter, which is more modest, is to sift through our recent ancestors to determine which one had the brainpower and the necessary environmental pressures to produce a shift from animal communication to language---words in particular. Home erectus is a plausible candidate.” (Pg. 101-102)
He notes, “Whether or not a chimpanzee can infer what another sees, there’s no evidence that they engage in joint attention, either in the wild or in laboratory settings… Why the absence of joint attention in a species that can follow gaze and, according to some, infer what another sees? An obvious reason is a chimpanzee’s poorly developed ability to cooperate and to share… there is no evidence of spontaneous sharing in chimpanzees… The absence of joint attention in chimpanzees explains why they aren’t able to learn language… they fail not because they can’t learn grammar, but because they can’t learn the declarative function of words. Chimpanzees are only able to use words as imperatives, to obtain primary rewards.” (Pg. 127-129)
He argues, “I’m not trying to detract from the importance of Chomsky’s fundamental contribution to our understanding of language… [but] he missed a golden opportunity to highlight another basic feature: Just as there is no limit to the number of sentences we can create, there is no limit to the number of names people can invent to identify features of their environments… This chapter addresses some of the consequences of Chomsky’s neglect of words and suggest how words cold have been naturally selected. My goal is to reclaim words from the obscurity to which Chomsky relegated them and to show how they allow people to share knowledge and exchange thoughts.” (Pg. 141-142) Later, he adds, “Equally puzzling is Chomsky’s unwavering resistance to the communicative function of language in humans. He seems to have a blind spot regarding conversation, an activity that is uniquely human AND communicative… Chomsky’s blind spot for conversation is also consistent with a general confusion about the meaning of ‘word.’” (Pg. 158)
This book (although controversial) will be “must reading” for anyone seriously studying the various “animal language” experiments and studies.
Herbert S. Terrace is a Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at Columbia University. He wrote in the Preface to this 2019 book, “This book is based on the William Schoff lectures I gave at Columbia University. The topic was the evolution of language, words in particular… My interest in the evolution of language began… when I tried to explain the failure of a project in which I attempted to teach sign language to a chimpanzee, Nim Chimpsky. When naming my chimpanzee, I was obviously expecting a positive outcome. If I could teach Nim to produce sentences in sign language, I would have refuted Chomsky’s view that only humans could learn language…. It turned out that Chomsky was right but for the wrong reason. Nim couldn’t learn sign language, not merely because he couldn’t pronounce sentences but because he couldn’t even learn words… I concluded that Nim and similarly trained chimpanzees could learn to use symbols, but only as a means to obtain particular rewards, such as food, drink, tickling, and so on. What they couldn’t learn was that things have names.” (Pg. ix-x)
He continues, “Little did I realize that Nim’s inability to learn language would ultimately lead me to recognize why he failed. This book summarizes some of those reasons… I examine Chomsky’s theory of language and show why, despite his claim otherwise, it doesn’t explain the evolution of language. I also show shy his theory is limited to language as it is currently used.” (Pg. xvi) Later, he adds, “The main purpose of this book is to draw attention to the significance of words, and how their origin was the first step toward language. By learning words, some ancestor was the first individual to name and refer to objects and to engage in conversation, all without grammar!” (Pg. 30)
He recounts, “To confirm the grammatical ability of a chimpanzee, I thought it was necessary to obtain what psycholinguists refer to as a ‘corpus,’ a collection of ALL the utterances a child makes and the circumstances under which they occurred… Within thirty months, members of Project Nim assembled a corpus of more than 20,000 combinations containing two or more of his signs. Initially, I thought the corpus provided enough evidence that a chimpanzee could create a sentence. But as I was about to publish my results, I made shocking discovery While watching a videotape of Nim signing with one of his teachers, I noticed that she inadvertently cued most of his signs… Instead of naming the objects with which he played, Nim signed merely to obtain a reward.” (Pg. xix)
He adds, “Shortly after Project Nim ended, developmental psychologists began to discover emotional and cognitive interactions between human infants and their mothers during an infant’s first year. Those interactions are necessary antecedent of an infant’s first words. Their absence in apes seems to be the best explanation of why they can’t language… apes were unable to learn language because they couldn’t learn that things have names.” (Pg. xxii)
There’s no evidence that a nonhuman animal can engage in conversation. The signals that animals use to communicate encompass a variety of physical dimensions… Superficially, it may seem that songbirds’ duets are conversational… [but a] songbird’s message doesn’t transmit any new information… However fascinating, such innate signals are few in number and rarely exceed thirty different types in a particular species. By contrast, human mothers and infants engages in dialogues that reflect how they each perceive the other’s emotional a mental state.” (Pg. 5-6)
He summarizes other ‘Ape Language Projects,’ and observes, “There was no evidence that chimpanzees knew the meaning of the signs they learned. Although they accumulated sizeable ‘vocabularies,’ video analyses of their signing and use of symbols show that they were motivated by rewards and not by sharing knowledge… None of the sequences that chimpanzees learned to produce required a linguistic explanation. In each instance, chimpanzees learned to use signs or symbols as imperative commands: that is, as a means of obtaining rewards they could not otherwise obtain. Although human language has imperatives… [t]he overwhelming majority of words are declarative, and their sole function is to share information.” (Pg. 21)
He recalls, “Why hadn’t I previously seen or noticed [Nim’s] teacher’s prompts? The reason was simple. Each time I watched a videotape of Nim signing, I thought I was watching a chimpanzee making history by conversing with a human. It was as if I were observing Nim through a telephoto lens… that allowed me to zoom in on his signs at the expense of any context… None of Nim’s teachers were aware of their prompting. They told me that Nim’s gesturing made it seem as if they were having a spontaneous conversation with him… Once I saw how Nim’s teachers contributed to his signing, I began to document what, to the unaided eye, gave the appearance of actual conversations… Initially, Nim tried to grab whatever reward the teacher brought with her. Because it was withheld, he occasionally signed all-purpose ‘wild card’ signs such as ‘me Nim’ or ‘hug.’ On most occasions, his teacher prompted him with appropriate signs, approximately 250 milliseconds before he signed.” (Pg. 42-43)
He acknowledges, “It is, of course, possible that my conclusions about a chimpanzee’s inability to learn language are wrong. It has been suggested, for example, that a project in which a chimpanzee was trained by a smaller group of fluent signers would yield more positive results. A few years after publishing my results, I stated that ‘my conclusions could be disproved by an unedited videotape in which the chimpanzee and its trainer were visible in each frame. That tape would reveal the extent to which the trainer prompted the chimp and whether it was given small rewards to motivate it to sign… More than thirty years later, I have yet to see any evidence that challenges my conclusions… its absence speaks volumes.” (Pg. 49-50)
Later, he suggests, “A major goal of paleoanthropology is to identify missing links of human descent. My goal in this chapter, which is more modest, is to sift through our recent ancestors to determine which one had the brainpower and the necessary environmental pressures to produce a shift from animal communication to language---words in particular. Home erectus is a plausible candidate.” (Pg. 101-102)
He notes, “Whether or not a chimpanzee can infer what another sees, there’s no evidence that they engage in joint attention, either in the wild or in laboratory settings… Why the absence of joint attention in a species that can follow gaze and, according to some, infer what another sees? An obvious reason is a chimpanzee’s poorly developed ability to cooperate and to share… there is no evidence of spontaneous sharing in chimpanzees… The absence of joint attention in chimpanzees explains why they aren’t able to learn language… they fail not because they can’t learn grammar, but because they can’t learn the declarative function of words. Chimpanzees are only able to use words as imperatives, to obtain primary rewards.” (Pg. 127-129)
He argues, “I’m not trying to detract from the importance of Chomsky’s fundamental contribution to our understanding of language… [but] he missed a golden opportunity to highlight another basic feature: Just as there is no limit to the number of sentences we can create, there is no limit to the number of names people can invent to identify features of their environments… This chapter addresses some of the consequences of Chomsky’s neglect of words and suggest how words cold have been naturally selected. My goal is to reclaim words from the obscurity to which Chomsky relegated them and to show how they allow people to share knowledge and exchange thoughts.” (Pg. 141-142) Later, he adds, “Equally puzzling is Chomsky’s unwavering resistance to the communicative function of language in humans. He seems to have a blind spot regarding conversation, an activity that is uniquely human AND communicative… Chomsky’s blind spot for conversation is also consistent with a general confusion about the meaning of ‘word.’” (Pg. 158)
This book (although controversial) will be “must reading” for anyone seriously studying the various “animal language” experiments and studies.
February 19, 2024
The title of the book is repeated about every three pages in the text; that much of hammering came to annoy me. More interesting is the author's criticism of Chomsky, who suggested that evolution of language requires an innate capacity to create strings of words in a universal grammar, common to all human language. Terrace points out that the naming of objects using words is a more fundamental property of human language evolution. I do not understand why this would invalidate Chomsky's theory, however, since language is more than words, it is words strung together in a sequence that confers a meaning. Chomsky's universal grammar can be considered the framework that allows words to become language. Terrace places the origin of word evolution in Homo erectus, and relies completely on a publication by Bickerton. However, I believe Terrace elevates Bickerton's wholly speculative theory to a proven fact, which is not fair, at the same time ignoring paleontological evidence such as the endocranial imprints of Boca's area in the fossil hominids. So the title (plus its repetitions) is about the only thing in this book with which I agree, nevertheless it was good food for thought.
March 11, 2024
The author offers some very relevant critique of Chomsky, but displays an appalling lack of understanding of ASL and signed languages in general for someone whose research included using ASL. Also, some of his arguments about what does or doesn't constitute understanding a word seemed like splitting hairs until you had a piece so small it would support your chosen conclusion.
August 8, 2020
The first two-thirds is far more readable than the final chapters, which contain dense paragraphs on word origin theories.
July 26, 2021
dream shattering.
November 4, 2022
For psych
January 11, 2024
“Şempanzelerin öğrendikleri işaretlerin anlamını bildiğini gösteren hiçbir emaye yoktur.”
Sonunda evrime mantıklı yaklaşan bir anlayış 💫
“Gördüğünüz şeyi anlatma yönteminiz yoksa, aynı şeyi gördüğünüzü bilmenin yolu yoktur.”
Sonunda evrime mantıklı yaklaşan bir anlayış 💫
“Gördüğünüz şeyi anlatma yönteminiz yoksa, aynı şeyi gördüğünüzü bilmenin yolu yoktur.”
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews