All right. This is very long. So I have bolded words defined. You can skim over those, if you want, but please read the one on ASL. Following that, I have sections, with key concepts or people in the sections bolded the first time they appear, so you can skim down to the parts you are interested in.
First, though, I want to note that Oralism is the cruelest thing ever done to Deaf people-- it’s the denial of signed language to Deaf children in favor of ONLY amplification, speech therapy, and “listening training.” There is a famous Oral school in the US called The Clarke School, and at one time, the had posters of Washoe the chimp on the walls, captioned “Do you want to be like her?”
It’s dastardly and disrespectful to take the language of a community and culture not your own, and use it for experiments like this. It’s both cultural appropriation and animal cruelty. And just such a huge insult to Deaf people, I reel.
Anyway, here you go:
Language: A structured system for communication. It has a lexicon, syntax, and grammar. It has features (not all languages have all of them) such as noun declensions, verb conjugations, plural forms even in undeclined languages, noun genders, adjectival order (In English, adjectives precede the noun, and multiple adjectives follow this order: Possession, Opinion, Size, Age, Shape, Color, Origin, Material, and Purpose; eg, “my big red ball,” not “my red big ball.” “The smart black tracking dog,” not “The tracking black smart dog.”) And others.
Pidgin: A means of communication with little structure, that operates almost entirely on a semantic level, and usually exists between communities without a mutual language, who cobble together bits of cognates, inventions, and gestures, in order to communicate on a basic level.
Signed language: A generic term for an organic visual/gestural language used mainly by Deaf people. “Signed language” is preferred, with “sign language” being somewhat archaic. Although the definition is “visual/gestural,” organic signed languages usually rely heavily on facial expression and body turns as well as manual movements, and “gesture” is somewhat of a misnomer, since the movements of a signed language are systematic, and not merely “gestures.”
ASL: American Sign Language: the signed language used in the US, most of Canada, and is common in Mexico, although it is not used in any Deaf School I know of in Mexico. The preferred verb for producing and receiving ASL is “speak”: “I speak ASL.” (cf. Donald Grushkin, PhD linguistics, Deaf ASL speaker “I Refuse to Use ASL” [I’m trying to make a link])
ASL is the daughter language of French Sign Language, and the mother language of a number of signed languages around the world, including, for example, Costa Rican Sign Language, with which it has mutual intelligibility. It has no relationship whatsoever to British Sign Language, and no mutual intelligibility with BSL.
Signed English: One of a number of artificial glosses for English that is used in the US. These are not organic languages.
Pidgin Sign-English: What most hearing people actually use when they try to speak ASL, and also any time they speak orally and manually at the same time.
Washoe: The first ape upon whom a language experiment was heaped. The scientists who designed the experiment were Allen and Beatrix Gardner.
Allen and Beatrix Gardner: They designed the first ape-language experiment; they were psychologists; they were not linguists or primatologists, and they were not specialists in animal psychology. They also did not know a signed language prior to beginning the experiment, nor, as far as I can tell, anything about signed languages. The Gradners initial findings were of success.
Nim-Chimpsky: Another chimp in a quasi-ASL program designed to replicate the Washoe experiments. This did not happen.
Herbert S. Terrace: Head scientist of the Nim experiments.
Koko: A Gorilla about whom extraordinary claims of language and higher thought are made (there’s a patched together supposed rant she goes on about how terrible it is that people are destroying the planet).
Penny Patterson: Koko’s-- something. Interpreter? Head scientist? BFF?
Sam & Ted Supalla: Brothers, both Deaf, with Deaf parents, native ASL speakers. Both in the field of Signed Language Studies with focusses on different aspects of ASL. Ted worked with the Gardners, and I think I incorrectly said before that it was Sam. They look alike, and I mix up their names. But Ted is the older one. He is the only native ASL speaker to work on the Washoe project.
The “Clever Hans” effect: This is a psychological phenomenon where a subject appears to solve complex problems but is actually responding to subtle, unintentional cues from their trainer or questioner.
Here’s what else you need to know.
Ted Supalla, the only native speaker of ASL to work on the Washoe project, initially excited the Gardners, and they assigned him to work with Washoe directly. He was highly critical of her “signing” and said it wasn’t anything in the room with ASL, and wasn’t even like a toddler’s signing.
He got reassigned to one of the other chimps with the hearing grad students. He was supposed to record (write down) any lexical item an ape made. The other grad students wrote down tons of stuff-- if an ape scratched itself, they wrote down that it “made the sign for ‘itch.’” Supalla was more exacting.
One day, someone’s chimp escaped, and Supalla asked if he was going to write down that the chimp made the sign for “escape.”
He got fired. Ostensibly, it was because his chimp was not as productive as other people’s, so he must not be working as hard.
The first time Washoe was ever examined by primatologists, they said she was grossly overweight. She mostly produced signs for food rewards-- rarely spontaneously.
Nim Chimpsky reportedly learned about 125 signs. His longest recorded sequence was this: “Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you.”
After reviewing video data, Terrace concluded that Nim was not actually using language. He argued Nim was simply mimicking teachers to get rewards (the “Clever Hans” effect) and lacked understanding of grammar or syntax. And possibly even semantics.
The study is frequently cited as an ethical failure. Nim was raised like a human child in a Manhattan brownstone but was abandoned by several caretakers and eventually sent to a medical research lab when funding dried up. He died of a heart attack at a much younger age than is typical for chimps.
Koko the gorilla had a very strange relationship with her trainer, Penny Patterson who worked with Koko from 1972, when she was a year old, until she (Koko) died in 2018.
Koko’s favorite sign was “nipple,” albeit, from what I can tell, she just liked to finger her nipple a lot, and Patterson said she was “signing” nipple, and then “interpreted” that this did not actually mean “nipple,” it meant “people,” and Koko was signing “nipple,” because it sounded like people.
Patterson got sued for sexual harassment over Koko’s nipple fetish, though, when she asked some female employees to walk around shirtless, because Koko liked to see breasts:
In 2005, three female staff members alleged that they were pressured to reveal their nipples to Koko by Patterson. The lawsuit alleged that in response to signing from Koko, Patterson pressured Nancy Keller and Kendra Alperin to flash the ape. Patterson reportedly said on one occasion, “Koko, you see my nipples all the time. You are probably bored with my nipples. You need to see new nipples.” Shortly thereafter, a third woman filed suit, alleging that upon being first introduced to Koko, Patterson told her that Koko was communicating that she wanted to see the woman’s nipples, pressuring her to submit to Koko’s demands and informing her that “everyone does it for her around here.” The lawsuits were settled out of court.
There is already a skeptical video posted in this thread, which is a great video, and I invite you to go back and read it (I’ll try to link to it in a minute). But in the meantime, here is a non-skeptical one from National Geographic. Watch it closely. Koko rarely signs anything unless her trainer has prompted it with either the sign or a spoken word gloss. For example, Koko signs something that looks like “hot” at one point, but it’s right after her trainer says the word hot. Koko also stirs a drink right after her trainer says the word “stir,” but she also puts a straw in the drink, and hands the other end of it to Koko.
Also, Koko does not at any point use any lexical item syntactically. Everything is on a semantic level. I have never disputed that apes can learn words. But that is not language. My dog knows a ton of words. I had a previous dog who knew over 100 words. She even knew a few in combination, and knew the difference for example, between “bath,” and “bathtub.” But she still didn’t know syntax.
However, because she was very obedient, I’ll bet with some training and editing, I could have made a video where it looked like she did, though.
Now, let me address the fatal flaw in all the ape-language experiments.
No one is using language with the apes!
A few of them say something like “mumble…hmm… American Sign Language…mumble…” But I don’t see anything but pidgin sign in any of the videos I have been watching.
So, while I do not believe the apes are capable of human language, they do not have proper language models in the first place.
Which brings me to Sam Supalla.
He studied Deaf children in pure signed English programs. It didn’t matter which form of signed English is was-- what mattered was that no child in the program was being exposed to ASL. No child had ever been to a Deaf school, there were no other Deaf family members exposing the child to ASL. And they needed to be programs with several children. Not one isolated child.
The first year of the experiment was just finding the programs.
Then he studied the children. He watched them, and interviewed them. They said things like “With my teachers, I use English, but with my friends, I just sign.”
He observed them. They used all the initialized signs they had been taught, but they made them directional, and they inflected verbs for time and effort, and other things that ASL verbs are inflected for.
This dovetailed with research on children presented with imperfect models of spoken language, who impose order on it.
So, based on Sam’s work, and the other work showing the same thing with spoken language, I would speculate that if apes had an innate capacity for language, they would impose order on the imperfect model of signed language presented to them.
That they don’t means most likely two things: 1. is that they have no innate capacity for language by definition of human languages, and 2. if there is an ape “language” it is so very alien to human language that to order of it cannot be imposed on the lexicon of a human language.
Once you have a conclusion like 2. you have to ask yourself what, at that point, you are talking about. It like asking at what point red becomes blue if you keep adding drops of blue. At first, the red absorbs the blue entirely; then it becomes a sort of rose-violet, then purple, then indigo, and finally, it is entirely blue.
At what point is some form of ape communication a language, and at what point is it so different from a human language that it cannot fairly be called that? I would say, personally, if it cannot absorb lexical items from a human language, then it does not fit the definition of a human language. That does not mean it isn’t communication. That does not mean on some level, it might not be more complex than human language. That does not mean that whilke apes do not have Broca’s area, they may not have some pinhead-sized structure as-yet undiscovered, that humans do not have, and that is crucial for ape communication. Or chimp communication, whatever.
Now, apes do have a Broca’s homologue, but it’s not exactly the same, and sometimes precision is the be-all and end-all. They have thumbs that are almost like our opposable ones, but not quite, and so come up short on lots of measures of manual dexterity-- BUT they beat us out in manual strength.
OK-- this is getting to be a dissertation. Let me leave you with one thing:
This is the response of (my friend) Dr. Donald Grushkin (Signed Language Studies) answering the question “What ape species have been taught sign langauge [sic] ?”
"If by “learning sign language” you mean to recognize and produce some signs for nouns and actions, chimps and gorillas have been taught to do so.
“If by “learning sign language” you mean to recognize and produce signs in a comprehensible syntactical order and to hold a sustained conversation in that modality [emp added], then only Homo Sapiens has been demonstrably proven to do so.”
