Kanzi: The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind (11 page)

As important as Terrace’s work had been, I recognized that it was not fundamental to real progress in ape-language research. It was, of course, important to demonstrate that multiword utterances were often the result of imitation. But this still left the field firmly in the hands of linguists, to whom syntax is sacred. By the time of the Clever Hans Conference and the publication of Terrace’s
Science
paper, I knew that this was misguided, particularly as applied to ape-language research. As a result of my earlier concerns over apes’ comprehension, and my more recent project with Sherman and Austin, I knew that we
had to shift our attention away from sentences and turn it to words.

Because researchers saw that apes built vocabularies so easily by associative learning of individual symbols, there was little thought about what the symbols might mean to the apes. Researchers simply leapt ahead to look for signs of syntax in word combinations. In doing so, they were assuming that when an ape learns a word, it attaches the same linguistic representational aspect to it that children do when they learn a word. The central issue is this: Does the ape
know
that the symbol can stand for an object that may be absent?

There are four components to linguistic representation: (1) an arbitrary symbol that stands for, and can take the place of, a real object, event, person, action, or relationship; (2) stored knowledge regarding the actions, objects, and relationships relating to that symbol; (3) the intentional use of that symbol to convey stored knowledge to another individual who has similar real-world experiences and has related them to the same symbol system; and (4) the appropriate decoding of and response to the symbol of the recipient. A word comes to represent an object, separate from it in place and time.

It was not clear that Washoe or Lana, or any of the other signing apes I had encountered, possessed full linguistic representation, or referential, abilities. They could use a symbol, in what was often a contextually cued situation, to request an object or activity. But they were usually unable to decode the symbol when it was used by a human in a simple request. As a result, the complexity of communication achieved by these apes was no greater than the basic communicative level of chimpanzees who were not language trained. This absence of full comprehension in language-trained apes was, I felt strongly, a more fundamental criticism of ape-language research than the absence of syntax, as demonstrated by Terrace. Cooperative comprehension is fundamental to language, and two-way communication that does not reflect comprehension is not language, no matter what other attributes it may possess.

I had reached these conclusions as the storm over ape-language research was about to break, and assembled them in
a paper titled “Do Apes Use Language?” in
American Scientist
, with. Sarah Boysen and Duane Rumbaugh as co-authors. Because of extraordinary delay in publication, the paper came out two months after Terrace’s
Science
paper, but four months prior to the Clever Hans Conference. We concluded the paper with the following: “Experimenters must stop looking for superficial similarities between apes and children and must instead investigate the cognitive competencies that underlie symbolic processes.”
¹³
That was precisely where the project with Sherman and Austin would take us.

3

Sherman and Austin were two and a half and one and a half years old, respectively, when the Animal Model Project commenced, in June of 1975. The primary goal of the project was to elucidate the processes of language acquisition in apes and compare them with the phenomenon of spontaneous language acquisition in human children. This goal encompassed practical and theoretical issues. First, it continued and extended the effort to develop language-training techniques that might help severely mentally retarded children. Duane had initiated that endeavor at the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center in 1970, with the Lana project. Second, it asked,
in what sense
can a species other than
Homo sapiens
develop language?

The unease I had experienced over the strong claims for language competence in the chimpanzees I was most familiar with—Washoe, Lucy, and Lana—encouraged me to guide the investigation with Sherman and Austin in a very different direction. The goal of most researchers in the field had been to determine whether apes
have
language, in much the same way as you might determine whether they have a thumb or a stomach. As we saw earlier, it was expected that if apes do have language, its presence would be revealed by the animals’ innate syntactical competence, a putatively genetically determined ability to order the symbols in multiword utterances.

My goal was at once to be more modest and more ambitious than seeking signs of syntax: I planned to focus on words, not
sentences. More specifically, I was interested in the animals’ ability to comprehend and communicate. I had no ambitions to instill in Sherman and Austin an impressively extensive vocabulary. Nor would I spend time encouraging multisymbol utterances. Instead, I was reaching beyond these staples of ape-language research, seeking to touch the essence of language: the ability to tell another individual something he or she did not already know. I wanted Sherman and Austin to use symbols referentially with each other, in true, humanlike communication.

The journey toward that goal turned out to be longer and more arduous than I had expected, and at every step of the way I encountered problems, primarily because of unsubstantiated assumptions I made about what Sherman and Austin would be able to do as we progressed. I came away from the experience—one I felt I had jointly shared with Sherman and Austin—with a better understanding of the nature of language and its acquisition. The results of the project also advanced ape-language research in a fundamentally conceptual manner.

The unfolding of the Animal Model Project happened to parallel in time the rising fomentation over the validity of ape-language research, which I described in
Chapter 2
. By the time Herbert Terrace published his influential
Science
paper, in November 1979, and the Clever Hans Conference of the New York Academy of Sciences had taken place, in May 1980, Sherman and Austin had achieved a level of language competence—in the sense of true symbolic communication—that far surpassed that of any of the apes so frequently cited by both proponents and opponents of ape-language research. I had been working with them for five years at that point. Ironically, because I had eschewed syntax as a goal in my project, Sherman and Austin received not even as much as a footnote in the debate.

From the very beginning, the two chimps were very different from each other. Sherman was, and has remained, the physically bigger of the two. Partly as a result of this, Sherman has the
ability to be the dominant individual whenever he chooses. Just as striking, however, are their personality differences. Sarah Boysen once aptly described Sherman as the football player and Austin as the stamp collector. Sherman has always been extremely active and reactive and always in the middle of things when some commotion is going on. When he was young he was constantly hurling himself into my lap and leaping onto my head—I suffered a perpetual sore neck as a result. And when he was older I had to tape thumbtacks onto the back of my hands to discourage his rough, albeit friendly, play-bites. When Sherman gets mad he erupts volcanically, with impressive displays, rushing around, puffing his hair out, banging things, and even slappings or pushing me. But it is all over very quickly. You know where you are with him.

Austin is much quieter, gentler, and slower to react. But when he does get angry he is much more dangerous than Sherman, because he often seems to slip beyond his own control. On occasion he has pulled me off my feet and thrown me to the floor so forcefully that it is difficult to get up afterward. I often feel sorry for Austin, because at two months of age he apparently couldn’t digest his mother’s milk and was failing to thrive. He was therefore separated from her and as a result displayed a behavior common to young chimps who suffer early separation: Whenever he was distressed he rocked rhythmically from side to side while holding his blanket. Fortunately, as an adult he has outgrown this behavior. I have no idea why, but when Austin sees a picture or a doll-like figure of a human or chimpanzee infant, he tries to destroy it, and becomes agitated if he is thwarted.

In the years I’ve known the two chimps, I’ve never seen anything that would indicate a significant difference in their basic intelligences. Nevertheless, it is interesting to see how their personalities are reflected in the way they approach tasks. For instance, Sherman always prefers to communicate with gestures and other nonsymbolic means if he can. Austin is a keyboard individual. And Sherman is much better at tasks that require participation, while Austin excels at tasks requiring close observation and attention. These differences, and differences in the mistakes each makes with symbol-use from time to time, have persuaded me that we shouldn’t talk facilely about
the
chimpanzee mind. Surely, Sherman and Austin share something of a basic chimpanzee view of the world, but their individual experience of it is undoubtedly very different.