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

communication was principally about food. Unlike what happened in other projects, however, she was required to build a sentence in order to obtain food or some kind of play activity: for example,
please machine give piece of orange
and
please machine make music
. After four years Lana had an extensive vocabulary with the system, some one hundred symbols, and she had produced a small but significant number of novel sentences. Most of her utterances, however, were of the sort just mentioned. My first impression of Lana was that she knew what she was talking about. I’m sure that the sentence structure she had been taught to produce on the keyboard encouraged that belief. After all, linguists insisted that word order—syntax—was the key to language, and Lana was producing such order. However, I soon formed the same unease with Lana that had surfaced at Oklahoma concerning the chimps’ ability to comprehend the words they used. Lana was producing sentences that were comprehensible to me as English construction, but, I wondered, did Lana understand the meaning of the words she was using? When I asked her to do things (such as give me an object), using the same vocabulary of words she employed in her sentences, she could not respond reliably. In an attempt to respond, she would produce inappropriate stock sentences and sometimes nonsentences. She seemed to be searching around for something that would satisfy me, but she wasn’t sure what it was. Lana, like Washoe and the other chimps, appeared to be productively competent (using words to request things) but not receptively competent (comprehending what was said to her).
    I began to wonder whether there might be several aspects to what we call a word. We assume with human children that the learning of a word includes its comprehension. It seemed to me that productive competence and receptive competencemight be discrete cognitive abilities and, in apes at least, might have to be taught separately. Perhaps ape-language researchers had made the mistake of assuming that, as with human infants, once an ape learned a word it also understood its meaning. Perhaps making the leap to search for signs of syntax was not only premature, but also irrelevant to the core of language.
    With these kinds of questions still somewhat inchoate in my mind, I began voicing my concerns to Duane. At first he was unconvinced by my suggestions that he and other researchers were making assumptions about the language competence of apes, and were falling victim to a rich interpretation of the apes’ utterances. But he listened. We agreed that I would assist him with a new project, with two young male chimpanzees, Sherman and Austin, with a slightly different focus. Beginning in 1976, I established a much closer physical proximity with the apes, interacting with them in a social, preschool-like setting. This would emphasize communicative needs rather than promoting teaching efficiency. The distinction, I believed, was fundamentally important. Further, unlike all previous ape-language projects, this one would not have as its goal the production of word combinations or sentences. I wasn’t in search of the linguists’ holy grail. I was going to focus on words: What does a word mean to a chimpanzee, and how can we find out?

    Just as I was embarking on the Sherman and Austin project, in 1976, a storm was gathering over ape-language research as a whole. The storm clouds rolled in from two directions: From one, linguists poured scorn on the validity of the research and questioned the competence of the researchers. From the other, a prominent ape-language researcher—Herbert Terrace—declared that he and his fellow researchers had been mistaken in believing that apes had acquired language. By the end of the decade ape-language research was completely engulfed in the resulting turbulence, and as a field of study was all but destroyed.
    For some time during the mid-1970s, Thomas Sebeok, a linguist at Indiana