Word: rumbaugh
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...1/2-year-old child and a taste for movies about cavemen. The 12-year-old pygmy chimpanzee lives with a colony of other apes in a cage complex on the wooded campus of the Georgia State University Language Research Center, near Atlanta. Under the tutelage of psychologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, he makes his desires known either by pointing to symbols printed on a laminated board or by punching the symbols on a special keyboard that then generates the words in English. While Kanzi cannot speak (apes lack the vocal control to form words), he understands spoken language...
...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...