Language And Intelligence In Monkeys And Apes

This is the first collection of articles completely and explicitly devoted to the new field of 'comparative developmental evolutionary psychology' - that is, to studies of primate abilities based on frameworks drawn from developmental psychology and evolutionary biology. These frameworks include Piagetian and neo-Piagetian models as well as psycholinguistic ones. The articles in this collection - originating in Japan, Spain, Italy, France, Canada and the United States - represent a variety of backgrounds in human and nonhuman primate research, including psycholinguistics, developmental psychology, cultural and physical anthropology, ethology, and comparative psychology. The book focuses on such areas as the nature of culture, intelligence, language, and imitation; the differences among species in mental abilities and developmental patterns; and the evolution of life histories and of mental abilities and their neurological bases. The species studied include the African grey parrot, cebus and macaque monkeys, gorillas, orangutans, and both common and pygmy chimpanzees.

What is language and what is the nature of the intelligence that can acquire it? This volume, originally published in 1976, describes 10 years of research devoted to these questions. The author describes his programmatic research of decomposing language into atomic constituents, designing and applying training programs for teaching these to chimpanzees, and for teaching chimps major human ontological categories, as well as for interrogative, declarative, and imperative sentence forms. The volume details the progress from teaching apes simple predicates such as same–different, to more complex predicates such as if–then, and the success of the program led to the following questions directly related to intelligence: What made the training program effective? What is the cognitive equipment of the species which enables it to learn language? What does this tell us about human intelligence? The answers were suggested in terms of conceptual structure, representational capacity, memory and the ability to handle second-order relations. The results of this experimentation, which resulted in synonymy in some animals, shed light not only on the nature of language, but the nature of intelligence as well. One of the earliest ape language and intelligence studies, today this classic can be read and enjoyed again in its historical context.

Current primate research has yielded stunning results that not only threaten our underlying assumptions about the cognitive and communicative abilities of nonhuman primates, but also bring into question what it means to be human. At the forefront of this research, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh recently has achieved a scientific breakthrough of impressive proportions. Her work with Kanzi, a laboratory-reared bonobo, has led to Kanzi's acquisition of linguistic and cognitive skills similar to those of a two and a half year-old human child. Apes, Language, and the Human Mind skillfully combines a fascinating narrative of the Kanzi research with incisive critical analysis of the research's broader linguistic, psychological, and anthropological implications. The first part of the book provides a detailed, personal account of Kanzi's infancy, youth, and upbringing, while the second part addresses the theoretical, conceptual, and methodological issues raised by the Kanzi research. The authors discuss the challenge to the foundations of modern cognitive science presented by the Kanzi research; the methods by which we represent and evaluate the abilities of both primates and humans; and the implications which ape language research has for the study of the evolution of human language. Sure to be controversial, this exciting new volume offers a radical revision of the sciences of language and mind, and will be important reading for all those working in the fields of primatology, anthropology, linguistics, philosophy of mind, and cognitive and developmental psychology.

A look at the origins of cognitive abilities in primate species. Since Darwin’s time, comparative psychologists have searched for a good way to compare cognition in humans and nonhuman primates. In Origins of Intelligence, Sue Parker and Michael McKinney offer such a framework and make a strong case for using human development theory (both Piagetian and neo-Piagetian) to study the evolution of intelligence across primate species. Their approach is comprehensive, covering a broad range of social, symbolic, physical, and logical domains, which fall under the all-encompassing and much-debated term intelligence. A widely held theory among developmental psychologists and social and biological anthropologists is that cognitive evolution in humans has occurred through juvenilization—the gradual accentuation and lengthening of childhood in the evolutionary process. In this work, however, Parker and McKinney argue instead that new stages were added at the end of cognitive development in our hominid ancestors, coining the term adultification by terminal extension to explain this process. Drawing evidence from scores of studies on monkeys, great apes, and human children, this book provides unique insights into ontogenetic constraints that have interacted with selective forces to shape the evolution of cognitive development in our lineage. “The authors’ elegant theory and comprehensive empirical synthesis of how the development of human intelligence and brain evolved opens up cascading heuristic avenues for creatively answering one of the great questions in the human history of ideas.” —Jonas Langer, Human Development “A handy source of information on comparative cognitive abilities related to life history and brain variables.” —James Anderson, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

What is language and what is the nature of the intelligence that can acquire it? This volume, originally published in 1976, describes 10 years of research devoted to these questions. The author describes his programmatic research of decomposing language into atomic constituents, designing and applying training programs for teaching these to chimpanzees, and for teaching chimps major human ontological categories, as well as for interrogative, declarative, and imperative sentence forms. The volume details the progress from teaching apes simple predicates such as same-different, to more complex predicates such as if-then, and the success of the program led to the following questions directly related to intelligence: What made the training program effective? What is the cognitive equipment of the species which enables it to learn language? What does this tell us about human intelligence? The answers were suggested in terms of conceptual structure, representational capacity, memory and the ability to handle second-order relations. The results of this experimentation, which resulted in synonymy in some animals, shed light not only on the nature of language, but the nature of intelligence as well. One of the earliest ape language and intelligence studies, today this classic can be read and enjoyed again in its historical context.

This anthology was originally planned in connection with a symposium "Language in Primates: Implications for Linguistics, Anthropology, Psychology, and Philosophy," at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio. Publication of the book would not have been possible without the support given to the Symposium by many individuals and groups. The Editors thank everyone involved for their kind and generous assistance. Specifi cally, we thank the invited speakers at the Symposium, Thomas A. Sebeok, H. Lyn Miles, Roger S. Fouts, and Thomas Simon. The chapters in this book by Miles, Fouts, and Simon are revised versions of their lectures at the Symposium. We thank Edward Simmel for his encouragement, his patience with our efforts, and his help in planning and directing the Symposium. For their financial assistance, we thank the co-sponsors of the Symposium: the Sigma Chi Foundation/William P. Huffman Scholar-in Residence Program at Miami University, as well as the Departments of Classics, Philosophy, Psychology, and Sociology and Anthropology at Miami. We thank Barbara Johnson, Polly J. Harris and Brenda Shaw for their secretarial and editorial help, and Shirley Gallimore for her patience, care, good humor, and hard work in typing the manuscript. Finally, we thank the contributors to this volume.

What is animal intelligence? In what ways is it similar to human intelligence? Many behavioral scientists have realized that animals can be rational, can think in abstract symbols, can understand and react to human speech, and can learn through observation as well as conditioning many of the more complicated skills of life. Now Duane Rumbaugh and David Washburn probe the mysteries of the animal mind even further, identifying an advanced level of animal behavior—emergents—that reflects animals’ natural and active inclination to make sense of the world. Rumbaugh and Washburn unify all behavior into a framework they call Rational Behaviorism and present it as a new way to understand learning, intelligence, and rational behavior in both animals and humans. Drawing on years of research on issues of complex learning and intelligence in primates (notably rhesus monkeys, chimpanzees, and bonobos), Rumbaugh and Washburn provide delightful examples of animal ingenuity and persistence, showing that animals are capable of very creative solutions to novel challenges. The authors analyze learning processes and research methods, discuss the meaningful differences across the primate order, and point the way to further advances, enlivening theoretical material about primates with stories about their behavior and achievements.

In the 1970s, the behavioral psychologist Herbert S. Terrace led a remarkable experiment to see if a chimpanzee could be taught to use language. A young ape, named “Nim Chimpsky” in a nod to the linguist whose theories Terrace challenged, was raised by a family in New York and instructed in American Sign Language. Initially, Terrace thought that Nim could create sentences but later discovered that Nim’s teachers inadvertently cued his signing. Terrace concluded that Project Nim failed—not because Nim couldn’t create sentences but because he couldn’t even learn words. Language is a uniquely human quality, and attempting to find it in animals is wishful thinking at best. The failure of Project Nim meant we were no closer to understanding where language comes from. In this book, Terrace revisits Project Nim to offer a novel view of the origins of human language. In contrast to both Noam Chomsky and his critics, Terrace contends that words, as much as grammar, are the cornerstones of language. Retracing human evolution and developmental psychology, he shows that nonverbal interaction is the foundation of infant language acquisition, leading up to a child’s first words. By placing words and conversation before grammar, we can, for the first time, account for the evolutionary basis of language. Terrace argues that this theory explains Nim’s inability to acquire words and, more broadly, the differences between human and animal communication. Why Chimpanzees Can’t Learn Language and Only Humans Can is a masterful statement of the nature of language and what it means to be human.