Essay: Apes’ Cognitive Language: Analyzing Sherman & Austin and Kanzi’s Experiments.

Paste your essay in here..Why isn’t there a chimpanzee Shakespeare? Why can’t bonobos bash a friend behind his or her back? Or do they actually have a world of gossip and drama that is simply yet to be found by humans? When we say language, we typically think of speaking and vocalization that delivers meaning, but it encompasses so much more. As a matter of fact, our ancestors’ first form of language lies in the gestural domain, and such is found only in Hominoidea, which includes apes and humans. Specifically, manual communication with no direct physical contact is unique to humans and apes, rendering various experiments to test whether apes truly are capable of understanding why and by what means they communicate with an involved partner. In short, the point in contention is whether apes have a mind of their own for cognition that takes specific situations into consideration. The numerous experiments of Washoe, Sherman & Austin, and Kanzi have given way to the possibility of social cognition in apes, a still highly contested matter at hand; so if their behavior differs depending on context, would it be a manifestation of ape understanding of communication?
There has been a shift toward a more flexible form of communication in our prehominind ancestors called defined usage. Presumably, it is the flexibility of a certain gesture to account for different meanings in different social contexts. This means that gestures are more driven by social factors than biological ones such as emotion, suggesting that apes may after all be able to vary their behavior to be more population specific. Findings on bonobos have shown that behavioral gestures are differential across different groups due to cultural variation, alluding to the fact that apes are capable of modifying and socially transmitting learned behavior. That gestures are evolutionary younger, for they are prevalent in apes but not monkeys, proves it is a field of language under greater cortical control, thus explaining for early hominins’ acquisition of symbolic meaning. Could this be the case for apes too? Multiple experiments elucidate and at the same time disprove that gestural hints suggest the probability of apes’ “symbolic” understanding of communication.
Viki, a common chimpanzee, was raised at a home as a part of a human family in the 1950s with the purpose of teaching her human speech. Unfortunately, such experiment ended as a sheer debacle, for all she managed to say were mama, papa, cup, and up. After such failure to see a chimpanzee speak, psychologists Allen and Beatrix Gardner shifted the focus of their studies from vocal to gestural communication in the form of American Sign Language. They intended to teach American Sign Language to a common chimpanzee named Washoe and even succeeded to some degree, for Washoe could use more than 150 of the 350 sign languages that she learned. She even began to regulate the behavior of her experimenters, suggesting the emergence of pre-linguistic intentional communication, a developmental process that is prevalent in human infants as well. With this as a turning point, infants are at last able to conduct functional communication in terms of their environment through other components of it such as the behavior of others instead of acting as independent units of their environment though their own actions only. Such skill was thought to allow chimpanzees, in correlation with human infants’ advancement from the passive respondent to the intentional communicator, to grow into dependent participants of co-regulated interactions.
However, Nim Chimsky, another common chimpanzee that was taught ASL, entirely over-turned this idea that chimps “understood” how syntactic elements worked to communicate. Herbert Terrace discovered that Nim Chimpsky was simply mimicking his trainers as could be seen in videotapes in which trainers would urge Nim Chimpsky to recant or repeat certain words. Terrace thus discredited the Gardners’ assumption that apes could use language as an intentional agent, claiming that apes were merely capable of conditioning. Now it’s obvious that in this sense, Nim Chimskpy served as a significant impetus to a great change in the Association of Reasearch Libraries’ experimenting method; but what was up with his name? Why was Nim Chimpsky named Nim Chimpsky? Initially, ape language was viewed from the information transmission angle in which apes were studied as individual units of communicative events rather than as interactive partners. The name Chimpsky signifies that was solely concentrated on language syntax wherein communication was perceived as a discrete sequence of unrelated participants. However, after finding the pitfalls of their previous experimental methods through Chimskpy, Association of Research Libraries researchers expanded their studies to the cognition of apes in relation to other apes and humans. They began to take on a pragmatic viewpoint of ape language capabilities, determined to test the possibility of apes having a cognitive mind of their own rather than one that is prompted by humans, eventually finding inter-individual interaction among apes.
The newly adopted dynamic systems model accounts for the failures of the information processing model which focused merely on the structures of communication rather than the acts of speech. Per contra, the dynamic perspective regards communication as a form of dance in which an active participant interacts with a mutually active partner, modifying and influencing each other’s behavior as they engage in each other. Instead of studying intentional communication in terms of individual minds, this model allows the interpretation of social relationships as an interplay of communicative collaborators. Savage-Rumbaugh employed this perspective into his experiment with Sherman and Austin. “The goal was to improve their communicative competence and, in doing so, more clearly define the skills involved, both at the behavioral and at the cognitive levels.” (Savage-Rum- baugh 1986, p. 404) Sherman and Austin showed the behavior of one-year old human infants, as they used lexigrams as a means of requesting rewards and expressing their intentions. It is through Sherman and Austin that the shift from conditioned to symbolic associations in apes was found, for they learned not only symbol-object pairing but the logical relationship of conversing between lexigrams on topics beyond training contexts as lexigrams were utilized in social relation to other lexigrams. Sherman and Austin began to attend more to each other, observing each other’s gestures and taking turns delivering messages. Basically, they were able to understand the concept of a mutually communicative partner on top of the mechanics of lexigrams, giving strength to Savage-Rumbaugh’s notion that language capability is to be searched not in individual minds but in apes’ interactions and the combinatorial contexts for their behavior.
As to whether apes do have a cognitive mind of their own that allows them to truly “communicate,” Kanzi, an infant bonobo, provides the final answer. The outcomes of Kanzi had actually resulted coincidentally in the midst of his observational experiment with Kanzi’s mother, Matata. As Savage-Rumbaugh was trying to get Matata to communicate through lexigrams, eliminating the mere teaching-learning sequence in the direct presence of trainers, Kanzi had been watching. It was found later that while Matata had failed to successfully communicate her desires by her own will, Kanzi had acquired communicative competence and began to deliver his needs through the lexigrams upon no one’s command or teaching. He was even able to understand spoken English. When tested his understanding of English sentences which were completely absent of semantic clues, Kanzi performed better than Alia, a two-year-old child. Surprisingly, he got 72 percent of the questions right whereas Alia got only 66 percent right. The fact that Kanzi could also connect various images and derive an integrated meaning—another sign of symbolic cognition—it is suggested that communicative syntax is not an ability only acquirable by humans. Kanzi’s language capability cannot be attributed to training or other peripheral “push” factors, for he wasn’t simply put into an environment wherein he was prompted to learn like other apes. Rather, he had begun using the lexigram upon his own will because he had cognized that the lexigrams were being used as a tool for communication and desired to take part in it. This means that Kanzi developed such cognitive awareness of his communicative respondent’s interactive goal, all on his own.
The Association of Research Libraries’ current method tests to see if apes can perform just “adequately well enough”; yet, this viewpoint raises some issues. Such approach to ape language capability is based on the assumption that there is a clear distinction between language and non-human primates’ “natural expressive behavior.” Thus, the behavioral results of these experiments are interpreted as either apes developing what somewhat resembles the language capabilities of humans, or as primitive and “natural.” The line between linguistic and natural behavior is still very vague, which makes interpreting ape language development even harder. Are the grounds for interpretation too set on the assumption that language and cognitive thinking are unique to humans? Findings through Washoe, Sherman and Austin, and Kanzi suggest that since communicative competence is present in apes, there might have been a prerequisite to language prior to modern humans. Though a definitive answer to whether apes have a cognitive mind of their own still does not exist, the shift from the information-processing system of the “isolated individual” to the dynamic system theory which regards linguistic communication as a co-regulating configuration of related participants has provided better lenses through which to perceive the matter. In order to draw clear conclusions, the focus of ape language capability studies should be on the creativity of their communicative behavior, for this is what accounts for the social complexity of apes’ language abilities.