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Note: These may or may not be valid arguments. You will need to use
your observations and knowledge of animal language research (videos, articles,
etc.), as well as independent critical thinking, to evaluate the validity
of these arguments.
The apes have acquired their limited vocabularies only with great
difficulty and intensive training. They can hardly be compared to
children, who effortlessly soak up dozens of new words each week.
Only if they are rewarded and required to perform will animals use sign
language or other languages they have been taught by humans, whereas
humans learn and use language spontaneously.
Chimps can make signs or push buttons in sequences to get a reward, but
so can pigeons (by pecking a specific sequence of keys to get grain,
Staub et al, 1979), and no one claims the pigeons are using language.
The animals are just imitating the trainers (for example producing the
same signs the trainers just produced), but they are not creating novel
utterances and they don’t really understand what they’re “saying.”
After re-analyzing video tapes of a chimp he had trained (Nim
Chimpsky), Herbert Terrace (1979) concluded that much of Nim’s signing
was no more than imitating trainers’ signs.
The trainers are inadvertently giving the animals nonverbal cues that
help the animals respond correctly (like “Clever Hans”).
Although apes can certainly use symbols meaningfully, the evidence is
far from convincing that they can equal even a 3-year-old’s ability
to
order words with proper syntax. To a child, “you tickle” and
“tickle
you” communicate different ideas, but a chimp might use the phrases
interchangeably. These animals string together words in no particular
order instead of using grammatical rules.
The trainers overinterpret these animals’ communications, reading
into
them meanings and intentions that were not actually expressed by the
animal. Presented with ambiguous information, people tend to perceive
what they want or expect to see. Interpreting chimpanzee signs as
language may therefore be little more than wishful thinking on the part
of their trainers. For example, when Washoe signed “water bird,”
she
perhaps was just separately naming “water” and “bird.”
It is unlikely that animals would have the capacity for learning
language unless they actually used it naturally (they do not, as far as
we know). Noam Chomsky: “If an animal had a capacity as biologically
advantageous as language but somehow hadn’t used it until now, it
would
be an evolutionary miracle, like finding an island of humans would
could be taught to fly.”
Sources: Meyers (1990), Golden (1991), and Wade &
Tavris (2003)
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