Word: chimp
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...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...
...seemed like an extraordinary display of chimp intelligence, but retired Harvard Psychologist B.F. Skinner was certain that creatures much lower in the evolutionary pecking order could be conditioned to communicate in a similar way. Now the famed behaviorist and two of his students have published convincing evidence in Science to support his controversial belief...
...scientists of the Third Reich; Vice President Lyndon Johnson furiously cooling his heels outside the Glenn house because Annie Glenn would not let him in during her husband's countdown; Alan Shepard losing a struggle with his full bladder moments before liftoff; the overeager press terrifying Ham the chimp after his proficient flight; the astronauts surrounded by thousands of cheering Texans waving hunks of rare meat during an honorary barbecue in the Houston Coliseum...