Word: aping
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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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...
...obsessive device: the exaggeration of the aura of consumer objects, a devotion to gloss and glitz. An ice bucket or a set of "limited-edition" whiskey bottles in the form of a choo-choo train is recast in stainless steel; a porcelain effigy of Michael Jackson with his pet ape is slathered in bright gold glaze. Once in a while, Koons contrives an image of curious intensity, such as Rabbit, 1986, a stainless-steel cast of an inflatable plastic bunny, once pneumatic, now rigid and manically shiny, possessing some of the virtues of Claes Oldenburg's work 20 years before...
...child." If there is no village of strong adults, only warring teenage street gangs controlling a few blocks of city turf, then the gangs may do the child rearing. Kevin Glass was 10, a clever, skinny black kid already moving from mischief to larceny, when he began to ape the swagger of a 15-year-old member of the Neighborhood Crips gang, whose street name was Insane. Among older kids, Kevin had noticed already, it was the "gangstas" who always had money, guns, girls, the wary enmity of cops and the fearful respect of "chumps," or civilian noncombatants...