Inside Animal Hearts and Minds by Belinda Recio

Author:Belinda Recio
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2017-03-18T04:00:00+00:00

Kanzi

In the early 1980s psychologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh started working with bonobos (also known as pygmy chimpanzees). Savage-Rumbaugh addressed many of Terrance’s concerns by using lexigrams—visual symbols that represent words—rather than sign language. By avoiding sign language and the possibility of unintentional nonverbal clues, Savage-Rumbaugh and her team demonstrated that the bonobos in her study were truly learning the meaning of words and not just responding to cueing from trainers.

Scientist Sue Savage Rumbaugh reported that Kanzi, like other “talking apes,” sometimes combined signs to invent his own terms. For example, his board did not have a lexigram for “kale,” so he pointed to “slow” and “lettuce” to represent “kale” because it took him a long time to chew kale. Credit: Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0, William H. Calvin, PhD

Savage-Rumbaugh has worked especially closely with one bonobo in particular, Kanzi. As an infant, Kanzi often accompanied his adoptive bonobo mother, Matata, to her lexigram training sessions. One day Kanzi spontaneously began to use the lexigrams, demonstrating that apes can learn language naturalistically rather than only through direct training. After years of training, Kanzi now knows approximately five hundred lexigrams and three thousand words of spoken English. Kanzi has the distinction of being the animal who understands more human language than any other animal in the world.

When Kanzi hears a spoken word or question asked by an invisible interrogator through headphones, he chooses the correct lexigram(s) in response. He also chooses lexigrams to communicate his own requests and, on occasion, to make comments. The lexigram board—which is wired to a computer—vocalizes out loud each lexigram that Kanzi presses. Kanzi also has a non-electronic version of his lexigram board—a portable laminated poster that can be carried offsite. Sometimes he also uses tablets with specially designed apps in place of the old lexigram board.

In Savage-Rumbaugh’s more recent work with Kanzi, she reports that he is developing an understanding of the very basic features of a simple grammar, or “protogrammar.” For example, Savage-Rumbaugh asked Kanzi a question he had not heard before: “Can you make the dog bite the snake?” Kanzi responded by searching his toys until he found a toy dog and a toy snake. He then put the snake in the dog’s mouth and, using his thumb and finger, closed the dog’s mouth over the snake. By making the dog bite the snake instead of making the snake bite the dog, he showed a basic understanding that word order matters.

In the roughly sixty years that ape-language research has been going on, all four species of great apes have learned how to “talk” to humans at a basic level. They have learned how to ask for specific foods, toys, and activities, and they have commented on events in their lives. They have learned to understand our requests to do all sorts of things that are unfamiliar in the world of wild apes, such as sitting at a computer while wearing headphones and pressing keys. Despite all that has been accomplished, skeptics still assert that the interpretations of ape-language studies are overly optimistic and reveal more about the researchers than the apes.

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