Is it now considered established that gorillas and chimps simply don’t have the abstract reasoning capacity for language?
Browse drink polite nipple there hurry (That’s ape for “Yes”)
It’s not that they lack the capacity, it’s that they have no need for it in the wild. We teach them language for our benefit, not theirs.
Here’s a highly technical paper discussing it:
Considering that pet owners have their cats and dogs stepping on buttons to communicate, I doubt apes aren’t still being spoken with in gestural language somewhere.
I hope they keep doing it for the incarcerated Apes. I feel so sorry for them in zoos. The ability to say “stop” or “no” pleases me. Somehow.
WAY back in the day one researcher was teaching chimps to use a symbol-covered “lexigram” rather than signing; presumably because it removed any ambiguity over the ape’s response. Of course all of this gets into nitpicking about what “real” language is. But since I haven’t heard anything new about it in decades I presume it’s considered a dead end.
The examples of apes using sign language in any convincing sense disappear when you remove the handler from the environment.
When an ape (or a whale) demonstrates to use or understand a dependent clause, then I will agree that they can use something like a human language.
Whalesong is complex enough that, even if they don’t have dependent clauses, they might have other semantic constructs that we lack, and that they won’t take us seriously until we demonstrate them.
But our level of understanding is still crude enough that we don’t know on either score.
Oops, made a dumb joke.
Is it true that no ape has ever asked a question?
One just did, in the post I’m replying to.
If the topic of dog communication is interesting to you, Nova is currently showing an episode about dog communication using these buttons:
They briefly mention the experiments about teaching apes to communicate.
Thanks!
The story of the Nim Chimpsky I think highlights the general scientific conclusion….
Language requires the use of sentences, and Nim didn’t use sentences. Though Nim recognized and used signs, Terrace said he did not initiate conversation. When Nim combined signs, they tended to be highly repetitive and filled with “wild cards”—words like ME, HUG, NIM, and MORE.[30] For example, Nim’s longest utterance, 16 signs, was: “Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you.”
It’s also a super depressing story. Don’t watch the documentary on Nim if you are hoping (as I was) it was a cool story about a smart chimp with some interesting language theory thrown in.
I remember, as a kid in the 1970s, watching a documentary on PBS about Washoe, one of the chimps who was taught sign language. I particularly recall her sign when one of her trainers put a doll in her cup: “Baby in my drink.”
It struck me, back then, that there seemed to be a fair level of understanding on Washoe’s part, but whether that was actual intelligent communication, I have no idea.
I wonder what she actually signed, as opposed to what the translator said to the documentarian?
I can’t speak broadly about that, but I distinctly remember the signs which Washoe used for “baby in my drink.” I just looked at videos for the ASL words for each of those, and they’re very consistent with what I remember her signing in that documentary.
I can’t see the video - it may be geo-locked. What’s the conclusion? Does it follow Betteridge’s law (“Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no”).
Whenever I’ve seen videos of dogs allegedly communicating using buttons it’s been highly unconvincing.
They wasn’t really an answer to the question. The episode was more covering how scientists are just starting to gather data. The studies are in their infancy. The button pressing started with a speech therapist showing videos on social media and now lots of dogs use them. The data that is being collected is from the buttons which can somehow upload the button press data to be collected and analyzed. The dogs generally seem to be using the buttons for basic communication of single concepts, like outside, food, or walk. But that’s simple association rather than language. Occasionally, dogs do use multiple buttons together to express something more complicated in a unique way, like “ouch stranger paw” to let their owner know that they have a sticker in their paw. Those are the examples that the scientists are interested in since they are more like language.
They discussed a little bit about the ape studies. Those were more about trying to teach the apes to communicate in human language. The failures in that dried up a lot of the studies in that area. One of the dog scientists was saying that when he was considering studying dogs, people were saying he shouldn’t do it and he could lose his job because of how bad the ape studies have been. One thing that’s different with the dog studies is that it seems to be just letting the dogs communicate on their own through the buttons. Rather than the owners trying to teach them to speak human, the buttons are there for the dogs to use as they please.
If you get the PBS channel, you might see if it’s still in the schedule. The episode just came out. They generally repeat it for a little while.