Word: apes
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...that she had also mastered some phrases. At the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center in Atlanta, the husband-wife team of Duane Rumbaugh of Georgia State University and Susan Savage-Rumbaugh, employing a language of their own invention, called Yerkish (its symbols are projected onto a screen when an ape presses the appropriately marked key on a console), even got two chimpanzees to communicate with each other in this artificial "tongue...
Perhaps the most impressive claims came from Francine Patterson, a psychologist at Stanford, who said she had managed to teach a hulking female gorilla named Koko more than 400 signs. According to Patterson, the gifted ape then proceeded to higher linguistic levels by using word combinations to insult her trainers (You nut), compose rhymes (bear hair, squash wash) and invent metaphors (eye hat for mask, finger bracelet for ring...
Part of the talking-ape lore may come from the subjectivity of researchers. The Sebeoks note that when Koko is asked to give the sign for drink and makes the proper gesture but touches her ear instead of her mouth, Psychologist Patterson assumes not that the gorilla has made a mistake but that it is joking. If Koko smiles when asked to frown, she is displaying a "grasp of opposites." Say the Sebeoks: "Real breakthroughs in man-ape communication are the stuff of fiction...
...baby was "silly and ill-advised," but he agrees that animals are incapable of spontaneous conversation. The Rumbaughs maintain that their more recent experiments preclude the possibility of trainers giving cues, consciously or sub consciously, to the subjects, but they have their own reservations about the linguistic ability of apes. Acknowledges Duane Rumbaugh: "There is no solid evidence to date that would indicate that the ape is ca pable of using syntax with competence...
...whose honor Nim was named, he has no doubts. Says Noam Chomsky: "It's about as likely that an ape will prove to have a language ability as that there is an island somewhere with a species of flightless birds waiting for hu man beings to teach them...