Savage-Rumbaugh (1986)

Savage-Rumbaugh (1986)

1. Aim

   • To investigate the language acquisition capacity of a bonobo and to contrast it with common chimpanzees in a longitudinal study

2. Procedure

   • Indoors
     • battery powered keyboard with geometric symbols that brighten up when they're touched
   • Outdoors
     • copy of keyboard as laminated pointing board. *each symbol is called a lexigram*

3. Outdoor environment

   • 55 acres of forest/ 17 food locations/ must travel to "get food" each location for a specific food type. i.e. banana's to tree house
   • Kanzi learnt where all the food was located
   • could select food from photos on the ground and could guide another person to his chosen location
   • Learnt to use symbols to the keyboard to indicate where he wanted to go.

4. controls

   • 1 disagreement over spontaneous result
   • 100% agreement on correct vs incorrect use of symbols
   • 1 scored real time and 1 scored tape
   • Real time observer did not know the record would be used for reliability check

5. Participants

   • Kanzi; born 28/10/1980 in captivity- mother was a language chimp. Kanzi was assigned to the language research centre at 6 months. When he was 2.5 years he was using symbols spontaneously
   • Kanzi was 4 when the study was written. Kanzi's sister was Mulika, and she was 3

6. Variables + method

   • I.V
     • species of chimpanzee
   • D.V
     • Language Acquisition
   • Method
     • mainly a case study with Kanzi through a longitudinal design.
   • Kanzi and Mulika
     • they were also compared to Sherman and Austin (2 common chimpanzees). The data was gathered across a 10 year span and the study report on a 17 month period.

7. Language Theories