Word: pupil
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...Pupil (pointing to leg): Here...
...Pupil (tickling her): Me tickle Laura...
This dialogue between Laura and her charge might not seem unusual, except for one thing: the pupil was not a 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...
...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 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...
...turn-of-the-century German circus horse that astounded audiences by tapping out with his hoofs the correct answers to complex mathematical and verbal problems. In fact, as a German psychologist finally discerned, Clever Hans was picking up unintentional cues-changes in facial expression, breathing patterns and even eye-pupil size-from his questioner telling him when and how many times to stomp (or, more precisely, when to stop stomping...