Kanzi: The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh

suspicious of some of the rich interpretations of apes’ utterances I’d heard or read. No juxtaposition of words was deemed too strange to be interpreted as a reasoned utterance. For instance, the suggestion that the gorilla Koko was making puns and other kinds of word play, and had a concept of death, strained my credulity—even though I wanted to think that an ape was capable of such abstract conceptions. Third, Shane clearly understood more of what was said to him than the apes did. I could ask him to do simple tasks, and he would. When I asked a chimp to do a simple task, even as simple as picking up a specific object in front of her, there was often puzzlement—just as Washoe had experienced with finding the string. It was clear to me—as it is clear to any parent—that Shane’s ability to comprehend language developed ahead of his ability to produce language. This seemed not to be the case with chimps.
    I began to form the notion that comprehension, not production, was the central cognitive feature of language, particularly language acquisition. Comprehension is much more difficult to quantify than production of words, and so linguists had paid little experimental attention to it. In any case, the hegemony of syntax in linguistics ensured that production was held to be the defining characteristic of language competence. For the most part, ape-language researchers accepted what linguistssaid, and then strained to satisfy their criteria. Seeing this, I became discouraged at the prospects of moving ape-language research forward, and opted instead to devote the rest of my time at Oklahoma to studying infant development. I wanted to document as extensively as I could, the type of things that apes could communicate by using their accepted nonverbal system of glances, gestures, postures, and vocalizations.

    I met Duane Rumbaugh, of Georgia State University, at the 1974 meeting of the International Primatological Society, in Kyoto, Japan. By that time, Duane was two years into his ape-language project with the chimpanzee Lana, at the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center of Emory University in Adanta. In Kyoto I gave a paper on some work I had done earlier with Lucy, so Duane knew I’d had an interest in ape-language research. He also knew I was skeptical of some of the rich interpretation that was being made of apes’ language competence. Nevertheless, he invited me to a symposium he was organizing on ape language, to be held at the Southeastern Psychological Association meeting, which was to take place in Atlanta the following year. The paper I gave in Atlanta compared my experiences with Lucy and Pancho, and stated clearly that I saw no communicative advantage being bestowed on Lucy by her ability to sign. I was therefore clearly stating my position as an “unbeliever.”
    Six months later Duane called me in Oklahoma with an offer of a postdoctoral position at Georgia State University. This position would permit me to study at the Yerkes Center. I accepted at once, because Yerkes is internationally recognized as being preeminent in primate studies—and it had bonobos. To Duane’s disappointment, I refused to work on the Lana project, and concentrated instead on studying bonobo behavior and comparing it with that of common chimps. Gradually, however, I was drawn into the language project, pardy because of various problems that had developed when Lana was moved to a new, improved facility; Duane asked me to help sort them out.
    Initiated in 1971 with the explicit aim of developingsystems with which to teach language competence to severely mentally retarded children, the project had by far the most sophisticated means of symbol manipulation of all ape-language projects. The symbols were arbitrary geometric forms, which were displayed on a computerized keyboard. Lana activated a symbol by touching a key, which then lit up and was projected on a screen. As with all the ape-language projects at this point, Lana’s