'Communicates' seems to be a subjective term, and these talking apes are not nearly as fascinating when a closer look is taken.
From
Aping Language, a skeptical analysis of the evidence for nonhuman primate language, by Clive Wynne:
QUOTE
Kanzi, concluded the Rumbaughs, “clearly processed semantic and syntactic features of each novel utterance.” In other words, here was a nonhuman ape who understood meaning and grammar. Descartes and Terrace were wrong. The grail of the ape language studies had been found.
When I first heard of Kanzi’s achievements I was very excited indeed. I really felt that our understanding of the nature of the world and our place in it as human beings had been altered by what this bonobo had done. But when I studied the complete report of what Kanzi had been asked to do and started going carefully through the six hundred and sixty commands he had been given and how he had responded to each one, my excitement changed to disappointment.
For a start Kanzi — like Nim before him — did not show the increase in sentence length that is typical of children learning language. In fact, at 1.15 symbols per sentence, Kanzi’s average utterance is even shorter than Nim’s. And it turns out that to complete many of the requests that were put to him Kanzi did not need to understand grammar. For example when Kanzi was asked to “Take the hat to the colony room” — which Kanzi did successfully — all he needed was some sense of “hat” and of “colony room.”14 A hat may be taken to a colony room, but a room cannot be brought to a hat. Successful completion of this instruction suggests an understanding of some vocabulary, but it is not in itself proof of grammatical comprehension. To test grammar what are needed are pairs of reversible commands like: “Dog bites man” and “Man bites dog.” Just knowing those three words — man, bites, and dog — is not enough to comprehend the difference between these two statements. For that difference to be understood grammar is crucial.
Of the 660 commands that Kanzi was given, a mere 21 formed pairs of the “man bites dog” “dog bites man” variety that constitute a critical test of grammatical comprehension. Savage-Rumbaugh and her colleagues reported that Kanzi responded accurately to 12 of these 21 pairs — a modest 57% correct. On closer inspection, however, it became clear to me that their method of coding Kanzi’s responses was unreasonably generous. To take one example: They commanded Kanzi, “Pour the juice in the egg.” Kanzi proceeded to pick up the bowl with the egg in it, sniff it, and shake it. They repeated the command three times — each time changing the wording slightly — before Kanzi did what they asked him to. They nonetheless scored his response as correct. When they asked Kanzi to “Pour some water on the raisins,” he held a jug of water over a lettuce. This was coded as correct. Kanzi’s first reaction to the request to pour milk into water was to stick a tomato in the water. When asked to chase Liz he remained seated; when asked again he touched Liz’s leg and she chased him. All of these were scored correct. When Kanzi was given the two commands, “Make the [toy] doggie bite the [toy] snake” and “Make the snake bite the doggie,” in both cases the snake ended up in the dog’s mouth but both responses were coded as correct. Re-scored to exclude these false positives, Kanzi achieves less than 30% correct.
Why be so nitpicky? The point here is not to deny Kanzi’s achievements — what other nonhuman can convey so much to his caregivers, or understand so much of what they say to him? — but to quantify them correctly. The point is not to see whether Kanzi does something involving toy dogs and snakes when asked to “Make the doggie bite the snake,” but to see if he understands grammar. And, on any assessment not tinted with rose-colored glasses, Kanzi just doesn’t get it...
Next time you see Kanzi or one of his kind on a television documentary, turn down the sound so you can just watch what he is doing without interpretation from the ape’s trainers. See if that really appears to be language.
I've still not heard of any
linguists who support the assertion that Kanzi, Koko, Nim, Washoe, or any other 'talking ape' is utilizing "acquired language".
RayG
