Language in child and chimp?

Abstract

Recent successes teaching chimpanzees to engage in symbolic communication have again brought into question the Cartesian supposition that language is uniquely possessed by homo sapiens. Despite the very remarkable achievements of Washoe and Sarah, an objective comparison of these chimps' linguistic performances with those of a typical 3-yearold child provides scant evidence for rejecting Descartes' view. An organism uses human language if and only if it uses structures characteristic of those languages. The ability of apes or even 2-year-olds to communicate and use simple names is not sufficient reason to attribute the use of human language to them. The creative or projective aspect of human language cannot be overlooked. Efforts to explain the language deficits of apes in terms of impoverished language experience, anatomical deficits, or cognitive-structure differences are not convincing.

Can an Ape Create a Sentence?

“…Sequences of symbols produced by an ape may seem grammatically related to one another in the eyes of human observers. It does not, however, follow that the chimpanzee had any knowledge of the relationships that a human observer may infer (65). As difficult as it may be to train an ape, or any organism, to produce a sequence of arbitrary responses that may look like a sentence, it is even more difficult to show that those sequences have the structural properties of human sentences (63).…”

¿Puede un antropoide generar una oración?

“…--Las secuencias de símbolos producidos por un antropoide pueden parecer, a los ojos de un observador humano, relacionadas gramaticalmente. De esto no se sigue, sin embargo, que el chimpancé tenga algún conocimiento de las relaciones que un observador humano pueda inferir (65). Por difícil que pueda ser entrenar a un antropoide o a cualquier otro organismo, para que produzca una secuencia de respuestas arbitrarias que se asemeje a una oración, es más difícil todavía demostrar que ésas secuencias poseen las propiedades estructurales de las oraciones humanas (63).…”

Evolutionary anatomy and language

“…There is some reason to believe that her knowledge of language does not involve the normal computational system of language [see Arbib and Caplan: "Neurolinguistics Must be Computational" BBS 2(3) 1979] but may rather involve the use of a conceptual system of the type just outlined -a system quite distinct from language (though it interacts with it) and perhaps in a sense more "primitive." One might speculate that higher apes, which apparently lack the capacity to develop even the rudiments of the computational structure of human language, may nevertheless command parts of the conceptual structure just discussed and thus be capable of elementary forms of symbolic function or symbolic communication (see Savage-Rumbaugh et al 1978; and "Cognition and Consciousness in Nonhuman Species" BBS 1(4) 1978; Limber 1977;Terrace, forthcoming;Chomsky, forthcoming) while entirely lacking the human language faculty. Possible support for such a view derives from work indicating that humans with severe language deficit -perhaps literal destruction of the language faculty -can acquire systems similar to those that have been taught to apes (see Velletri-Glass et al 1973;Gardner et al 1976;Davis and Gardner 1976), as if, to put it very loosely, apes were in this regard like humans without the language faculty.…”