What did we learn from theape language studies?

The ‘ape language’ studies have come and gone, with wildly divergent claims about what they have shown. Without question, the most sophisticated skills have been displayed by Kanzi, a male bonobo exposed from youth to a human-like communicative system. This chapter attempts to assess, in an objective a manner as possible, the nature of the communicative skills that Kanzi and other great apes acquired during the various ape language projects. The overall conclusion is that bonobos and other apes possess most of the requisite cognitive skills for something like a human language, including such things as basic symbol learning, categorization, sequential (statistical) learning, etc. What they lack are the skills and motivations of shared intentionality-such things as joint attention, perspective-taking and cooperative motives- for adjusting their communicative acts for others pragmatically, or for learning symbols whose main function is pragmatic.

Duke Scholars

Author Michael Tomasello Psychology & Neuroscience