Word: chimp
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...could forget "The Great Wilno," a leather-clad stuntman who in 1929 was shot out of a cannon over the heads of startled spectators. Or the drenching downpours of 1939, or the clear, crisp days that came to be known as "Leahy's Luck." Or even Cheetah the chimp, who ate hot dogs, swilled soda and adjusted her sunglasses in 1968. Says Vivian Husted, 75, a handsome, white-haired woman from neighboring Oxford who has been showing her sheep for over 35 years, "I wouldn't want to try to replace this. I'd rather just give...
...human child but a young chimpanzee named Nim. Like several others of his primate kin, Nim had been taught to communicate with humans in American Sign Language, a system of hand gestures developed for the deaf.* He eventually learned to make and recognize 125 signs. But the frisky little chimp and other apes who have received such "language" instruction are now the center of a raging academic storm. The issue: can apes really master the essence of human language-the creation of sentences...
...years ago, the answer might have been an unequivocal yes. After all, Psychologists Allen and Beatrice Gardner of the University of Nevada had managed in the late 1960s to teach the chimp Washoe to use 132 signs; the precocious animal was even credited with having invented a phrase of her own, water bird for swan. About the same time, David Premack, of the University of California at Santa Barbara, using plastic symbols of different shapes and colors to represent words, taught his prize pupil, Sarah, some 130 words and reported that she had also mastered some phrases. At the Yerkes...
Toward that goal, Terrace, with Laura Petitto, a student assistant, and other trainers, put Nim through 44 months of intensive sign-language drill, while treating him much as they would a child. In some ways the chimp was an apt student, learning, for example, to "sign" dirty when he wanted to use the potty or drink when he spotted someone sipping from a Thermos. Nonetheless, Nim never mastered even the rudiments of grammar or sentence construction. His speech, unlike that of children, did not grow in complexity. Nor did it show much spontaneity; 88% of the time he "talked" only...
...noted in the work with Nim. There were rarely any "spontaneous" utterances, and what had seemed at first glance to be original sentences now emerged as responses to questions, imitations of signs made by the teacher, or as rote-like repetitions of memorized combinations. For instance, when Lana, a chimp at Yerkes, said Pleas machine give apple, the first three words seemed to mean nothing more to her than a mechanical prelude to obtaining something she wanted. Says Terrace in his 1979 book Nim (Knopf; $15): "The closer I looked, the more I regarded the many reported instances of language...