Apes’ language ability

A. Apes seem eerily “like us,” and this includes their ability to communicate with us on certain levels. In his famously colloquial, quotidian diary, Samuel Pepys, man of affairs of Restoration England, wrote:

It is a great baboone, but so like a man in most things, that… yet I cannot believe but that it is a monster got of a man and she-baboone. I do believe it already understands much english; and I am of the mind it might be taught to speak or make signs.

B. Early attempts to teach apes language. In actuality, when people have tried to teach chimpanzees to talk, the results have been limited. In 1909, one chimp learned to say mama. In 1916, an orangutan learned to say papa and cup. In the 1940s, another chimp learned to say papa, mama, cup, and sometimes up.

C. Apes and sign language. More recently, researchers have tried to teach chimpanzees sign language. The results have been somewhat more successful.

1. Starting in 1966, Washoe, at about a year old, took three months to make her first signs, and by four, she had 132 signs.

2. She could extend open from referring to a door to opening containers and turning on faucets, and she once signed water bird when a swan passed. She could even put a few words together into “sentences,” such as you me out for “Let’s go out.”

D. Ape language versus human language. But these chimpanzees are not using “language” in the human sense.

1. Inconsistency. They tend to respond properly to strings of two or more words only most of the time rather than all of the time.

2. Grammar or context? Some researchers have argued that understanding these strings of words shows that chimpanzees are using “grammar” in the sense of subject versus object and so on. But the correspondence between the words and the immediate context generally makes the meaning of the string clear without any sense of “grammar.” One ape knew that cooler sour cream put meant, “Put the sour cream in the cooler,” but obviously, this was the only rational meaning those words used together could have.

3. Imitation versus communication. One ape signed along with humans while they were communicating with him 40 percent of the time, while children overlap with adults speaking to them only about 5 percent of the time. This suggests that chimpanzees are imitating more than speaking on their own.

E. What is missing from apes’ language? The linguist Charles Hockett listed 13 features of language in the human sense. Among them, what is missing from chimpanzees’ (and other creatures’) communication are:

1. Displacement: communicating about things and concepts beyond the immediate context and urgency (an animal cannot tell its fellow animals about the giant squid carcass it saw washed up on the beach).

2. Productivity: being able to combine the basic elements of language in infinite combinations (as opposed to restricting communication to a small array of requests for food or announcements of where food is).