Animal Language

Animal Language - Chimp Communication

Chimps can learn, understand, and produce language:

Gua (Kellog & Kellog, 1933) - raised with their infant son, stopped after 9 months, could understand a few words but not produce any

Vicky (Hayes & Hayes, 1952)- understand words and some combinations, could articulate some with great difficulty

Nim Chimsky (Terrance et al., 1979), learned 125 ASL signs and made sign combinations, HOWEVER these were mostly simple repetitions with rare spontaneous signing, no novel combinations which is unlike human children

Chimps cannot learn and produce language:

Some of the most famous examples - Koko the gorilla still have questions around them due to the way they used language, reacted to those around them, mistreatment of the animals

Large differences between how human children and chimps utilise language during learning

Chimps • Huge amounts of (explicit) training • Rarely signed spontaneously • Little evidence of syntax • Mainly stimulus controlled (eating and sleeping) • All topics about here & now — no questions • Very repetitive Output was mainly non-creative

Children Require no special training • Lots of spontaneous production • Clear syntactic structure • Utterances involve temporal displacement • Ask questions (and lots of them) • Less imitation (some children rarely imitate) • Utterances quickly become more creative