Word: apes
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...time-honored fashion of ambitious young interns, Kanzi became involved in language experiments by catching the boss's eye. Savage-Rumbaugh noticed that the young ape was learning words she was struggling to teach his mother Matata. The language was a system of abstract visual symbols developed by Savage-Rumbaugh's husband Duane Rumbaugh during his first language experiments with chimpanzees. "If Kanzi could learn without instruction, I wondered, Why teach?" says Savage-Rumbaugh. From then on, Kanzi learned language much the way human children do: by going through the ordinary activities of his day while humans spoke in English...
Kanzi's most noteworthy achievement has been to demonstrate a grasp of grammatical concepts such as word order. Savage-Rumbaugh and psychologist Rose Sevcik created an extended experiment to compare the ape with a two-year-old girl named Alia in responding to commands expressed in 660 spoken English sentences. The sentences combined objects in ways that Kanzi and Alia were unlikely to have encountered before: "Put the melon in the potty," or "Go get the carrot that's in the microwave...
...early language studies. His real significance is that scientists are more willing to accept the results as valid because of the tight controls used during the studies. For instance, a one-way mirror prevented Kanzi and Alia from seeing who gave them commands, while those tracking what the ape and toddler did in response wore earphones to prevent them from hearing the requests. Each sentence was also utterly new to both ape and child. The young bonobo has thus helped break a two-decade deadlock during which language experimentation with animals was paralyzed by concerns that the animals were responding...
...moved nonchalantly away until the second chimp moved on. Once the interloper was gone, the first chimp opened the box to claim the food. The second chimp, however, had cleverly hidden himself just out of sight and triumphantly returned to snatch the bananas. There are enough examples of such ape trickery to suggest that perhaps Koko really was lying when she made the signs "Kate there...
...cover story was written and reported by TIME senior writer Eugene Linden, who has explored the field of animal intelligence for 20 years. He has authored several books on the subject, including Apes, Men, and Language, and Silent Partners: The Legacy of the Ape Language Experiments. "What strikes me is that so many humans seem offended by the notion of animal intelligence," says Linden, "as though it would devalue language and thought if we shared those abilities with other creatures." But just try to get a chimpanzee to take as good a picture of James Balog...