does anyone know if gorillas actually can use sign language?
or is it more conditioning?
i don’t know much details but i read something long ago about one gorilla doing sign language with some scientist…
but is it true?.. or was the gorilla taught to use phrases to get food…
my dog automatically gives a paw then lies down when i show a particular treat… different treat, she does something else.
if she wants a treat she whines.
i think a good way to test if the gorilla has language is to teach her words only… then she has to put them together. (did they do that already?)…
teach her… i want banana. then teach her apple.
show her a piece of crap to eat and an apple… will she say i want apple?.. or will she say i want banana.
i don’t know what they did or how they tested for this language thing …
This is reaching back into the dusty cobwebs of my mind, but I remember something about Koko giving a name to watermelon, a fruit she had never seen before. She signed it as “sweet water,” a pretty apt description.
Koko had a pet cat. When the cat died, she was allowed to choose another kitten. She blew into their faces. If you’ve ever blown into a cat’s face, you know that most of them really don’t like that. There was one that didn’t hiss at her and that was the kitten she chose. The cat had no tail and Koko named it All Ball.
From what I’ve heard, it appears that she did understand what she was signing.
While some primatologists did attempt to teach apes to use sign language, the apes never did really learn to communicate with it.
Read Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct for the whole story.
Essentially, apes don’t have a Broca’s Fold, the part of the human brain that allows humans to use language. The apes can mimic the signs but never truly communicate with the symbols. When highly trained ASL users were allowed to observe the apes, they found apes couldn’t use grammar or would often just repeat whatever the humans had just “signed” to them. And the primatologists were overly-enthusiastic about their interpretation of the ape’s signing.
Koko used to post right here at the Straight Dope. It really caused an uproar when she was banned. The mods said that it was because she was below the age limit, but most people contended that it was species discrimination. Personally, I think she was banned because of her atrocious grammar and spelling. The way she misused “there”, “their”, and “they’re” just about drove me crazy.
Here’s a link to an article in the Urban Legends archive. It is skeptical of the claims, and suggests there are serious methodological flaws.
To summarise, gorillas do not use sign language in the same way as people do. They apparently have no concept of grammar or syntax, which even young children do. Instead, they relied on repeating formulae and individual signs, rather than creating their own sentences. They use various gestures naturally in the wild that may be taken to be sign language.
Furthermore, almost all the people involved in experiments had no specific knowledge of human sign language. And anecdotal evidence that a gorilla occasionally made an apposite sign has little value, especially as it frequently depends on biased reporters recognising what they take to be a sign.
Exactly how can a researcher teach sign language to an ape without having specific knowledge about human sign lagnuage??
AFAIK, it wasn’t the reporters who wrote up or performed the experiments, nor conducted measurements on the ape’s performance. Much of the skepticism is based on the fact that correct grammar isn’t followed by the apes… well spend a little time actually listening to people speaking in different parts of the country and you’lll find many humans who don’t use grammar properly as well - ebonics anyone? Doesn’t mean you aren’t communicating.
Um, no. Ebonics* has a consistent grammar and is in no way a “broken” version of Standard English. Big difference between incorrect and socially stigmatized. The syntax of gorillas attempting to sign = ungrammatical, incorrect. Ebonics = grammatical, but not accepted socially.
-fh
*Ebonics itself is a fiction created by the Oakland School Board. You probably want to use “Black English.”
I was actually going more for regional and/or cultural inaccuracies in grammar… like “we’es headed out hunting bubba, y’all wanna come with?”
Funny how grammatical innaccuracies/mistakes are forgivable and taken in a completely different context depending on who’s doing the judging and what for… if a group of people all make the same mistakes, it’s considered correct - sometimes.
When my dad was learning english in Germany 60 years ago, it was taught by proper Englishmen, and you were an idiot and just plain wrong if you didn’t speak with an english accent and style, and your school grades reflected it.
I can speak french, but my verb tenses and vocabulary are horrid… it wasn’t taught to me very effectively in school (either that or I just didn’t pick it up very well :rolleyes: ). I have no problem understanding what people say in french when they speak at a normal pace, and I know exactly what I’m trying to say and am fully aware of what I mean when I spit out a french sentence, even though I’m sure I “sound” significantly worse than an ape does signing and I screw up all kinds of past/future tenses and use improper/made-up words.
I just don’t see how some errors such as signing: “Koko love Ball. Soft good cat cat” * when asked about her pet kitten or “Pour that hurry drink hurry” * when the ape is thristy mean that they have no concept of what they’re doing or are incapable of communication.
Everything here is based on the principle that we are using creative thought to respond, and that is what is supposed to make the difference, but are we really. Can’t our creative thought be broken down into complex formula? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people say to me “Hey, what if the universe was, like, one big atom?”. Certainly nobody told them that, but it was a creative conclusion that everybody seems to draw. Somewhere deep down there may be a formula that led to this and all other creative things as well. I’m no scientologist, and I don’t like to believe this, but only a narrow-minded person would dismiss a possibility with no reason other than they don’t want to believe it.
I know you mean well but you’re being confused by the use of two slightly different contexts surrounding the use of the word “grammar” in describing language acquisition and the neural processing humans employ in using language.
When we say “apes don’t use or have grammar” it doesn’t mean that they use bad or idiosyncratic “ape” grammar that left a participle dangling, but that they have no contextual grammar. Humans, regardless of the structure and linguistic complexity of their respective languages, have innate (some say physio-neurally innate) and common, subject-object etc. syntactic contexts in their use if languages. Apes do not have this and it is still an open question whether they have the brain architecture to grasp or make use of these language structures as part of a “grammar.”
As a side note you might want to be cautious about making concrete assertions that Koko and similar signing apes made use of “grammar”, as most of the evidence that they did has tended to wither or be anecodotally biased when viewed with empirical rigor per Freyr’s prior notation.
Can gorillas actually use sign language (in the sense of putting different words together to mean something that they were not specifically shown), *or do they just mimic more or less exactly what they were shown *(with no understanding of what it meant) in order to get food or please the trainers?" - Not “do they form structurally sound sentences that can pass a grade 6 english exam?”
And using the sample question given at the top:
If you showed them a peice of crap to eat and an apple, will they actually sign “I want apple”, or banana assuming they were only taught the phase “I want banana” to ask for food?
Well, yes - they do seem to be able to associate specific words with objects, put together crude pseudo-sentences of their own, and can ask for many different things and know what they’re saying.
Secondly, exactly where did I make any concrete assertion that signing apes use grammar, especially since the only time I used the word was when I was giving an example of how others and myself can use poor structural grammar in laguage, but still be communicating all the same. I never said they made use of grammar, never even had the two words in the same paragraph, and the examples I gave were simply signing quotes showing short, choppy examples of communication which I explicitly said contained errors. In fact, I haven’t made any concrete assertions on anything; I’ve just given some simple examples of how the signing apes do appear to be able to use sign language to actually communicate specific things as opposed to using mimicry to “beg fer treats” like dogs do - which is what the original question was asking as I understood it.
So here’s another example from the book… the gorilla was eating a crayon (bad thing to do), and was asked if that’s what she was doing - she started rubbing the crayon on her lips and sputtered out some signs to do with “no, and lipstick”. Pretending a crayon was lipstick (she knew the proper signs for both) and deceptively signing about what she was really doing.
Good link, very informative. I particularly liked the quote from the person who was the only native user of sign language in the group who said of the people who didn’t use signs in everyday life:
""Every time the chimp made a sign, we were supposed to write it down in the log. … They were always complaining because my log didn’t show enough signs. All the hearing people turned in logs with long lists of signs. They always saw more signs than I did. … The hearing people were logging every movement the chimp made as a sign. "
And the note about Jane Goodall: Jane Goodall commented, when watching Nim (the monkey who was the subject of one of the studies) at work, that she recognized all of Nim’s “signs” as gestures chimpanzees make in the wild.
** mmmiiikkkeee**
You clearly implied that we shouldn’t disparage the signing monkeys because their grammar wasn’t good enough. The point is not that their grammar is not good enough but that it is non-existent - from the link provided by refusal:
"One of Nim’s longer utterances was “GIVE ORANGE ME GIVE EAT ORANGE ME EAT ORANGE GIVE ME EAT ORANGE GIVE ME YOU” - this is “word salad”, not a sentence following the rules of ASL syntax. "
This puts me in mind of communication that is barely above the level of a dog barking to get a treat. A simple pavlovian action rather than a higher attempt at communication.
As for the examples from the book about Koko, I think refusal’s link deals with that pretty well also
i think i’m talking more about communicating using language…
no wait… … i can’t explain…
let’s say some scientist teaches a gorilla the word banana and the word gun.
showing a banana will prompt the gorilla to probably say i want banana(probably by just pointing at it).
but will the gorilla when shown a gun say “i hate gun.”
or teach the gorilla the word pineapple(without giving the pineapple, without associating the pineapple with want or eat.)
will the gorilla put the phrase “i want” and “pineapple” together?
i’m thinking that the gorilla won’t. it will to the sign for “i want banana” for the message i want to eat the pineapple.
this to me is just a learned reponse not language.
my dog can do the same thing with less movement but the same idea.
i don’t think i’d expect gorillas to use grammar or even use full sentences… just can they understand words. or is it just a learned behaviour… like when i say sit to my dog.
Regional variants of English (I’m not sure if it’s correct to consider them full dialects, so I’ll stick to “variants”) have rules of grammar that differ from standard American English, and the speakers are remarkably consistent in using the same structures–even if those structures that are “wrong” according to the rules of standard English. The variants are not inaccuracies or mistakes or errors as much as differences in the way that people speak the same language, which are perfectly understandable to others who speak the same variant.
In fact, someone who spoke the variant of English you were trying to imitate above could probably correct your grammar, pointing out that it’s spelled “We’s,” because it’s a contraction of “We is,” and that since Bubba is just one person, he’d be “you” or “ya,” not “y’all,” which is the second person plural. Your example would clearly be an inaccurate imitation of their speech to their ears, because you are not following their rules of grammar.
It’s not a matter of forgiving the supposed “errors” as much as acknowledging some people do not use standard English, but rather a self-consistent variant. If they are in school learning standard English, and they slip up and use a variant rule of grammar, then yes, they’re wrong. But when they speak their own tongue, they aren’t goofing up and making random errors, they’re following different rules of grammar.
To most people, yes, the variant would just sound ignorant and wrong, and most people would attatch a social stigma to a speaker of non-standard English, but to a linguist (or a dabbler like me, who just took Linguistics 101 and read a few articles about language) it’s just a variation from the standard.
That’s because your dad was being taught how to speak a certain dialect of English, namely, the Queen’s English. If he was being taught how to speak a different form of English, say, American English, then he may have been marked wrong for saying certain things that are correct in American English but are wrong in British English. That doesn’t make either British English or American English better, or make one right and one wrong. It’s a matter of context.
Your English (I’m guessing that you speak American English or a less strict modern British English) is not wrong or innaccurate or filled with mistakes compared to your father’s. Speaking the variant of English that you do doesn’t make your way of speaking wrong or make you an idiot–unless you are actually trying to speak the same formal variant of English he is, and failing. (And even then, I wouldn’t call you an idiot, because that would be rude and probably pedagogically unsound. :))
Do you only see the choice as being only one or the other? How about something in between?
There is a progression in this “word salad” that, even though it lacks grammar, shows a progression of thought.
Assuming the monkey was not given the orange until this set of signs was complete,
GIVE ORANGE ME - Give the orange to me
GIVE EAT ORANGE - Give me the orange to eat.
ORANGE GIVE ME EAT ORANGE GIVE ME YOU. - You give me the orange to eat.
This is more than dog barking (which according to Gary Larsen, bark bark bark bark bark = hey hey hey hey hey).
He/she is trying to clarify its message by adding more info as he/she signs. Why is this not the benchmark for communication? What makes grammar (which has no universal rules) the benchmark?
No one is arguing that apes don’t think, IIRC I think the issue was that in no case was ape syntax consistent in this respect, nor was it really built on or expanded in complexity over time by the apes as even human toddlers will do innately. What you are interpreting as clarification was, in fact, a considerably more random process in most cases and more akin to a random “word salad” surrounding the signed object of desire.
