Kanzi: The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind (31 page)

In any case, Kanzi demonstrated his ability to learn a syntactic rule from his verbal environment, and in so doing satisfied
criterion 4, which requires the presence of a formal rule (for example, place action words before object words). He also met criterion 3, which required that he be able to recognize that the ordering rule operated on categories (such as action and object), rather than specific words, as the chimpanzee Nim had utilized.

More important than Kanzi’s ability to learn rules, however, was his apparent capacity to invent them. Patricia identified two such rules: The first concerned the combining of gesture and a lexigram. In this case, Kanzi used a lexigram to specify an action, such as
Tickle
, then a pointing gesture was used to specify the agent. For example, if Kanzi wanted me to chase him, he first used the keyboard to say
Chase
and then pointed to me, or touched me to indicate that I was the one to chase him. Thus Kanzi’s rule was if you wish to engage someone in an action, specify the action first (via a lexigram) then specify the person (via a gesture). This happened even when Kanzi was right next to me and the keyboard was on the other side of the room; if he wanted to play grab or bite, he would walk across the room to say bite, then return to gesture toward me.

Not only was this rule arbitrary, but it was very firmly in place in Kanzi’s world, so much so that even being next to the intended agent did not disrupt the ordering that Kanzi had himself elected to impose upon his means of communication. It is significant that Kanzi’s rule of action first (via lexigram) and agent second (via gesture) represented the opposite order of the spoken English that we used around him all the time, and therefore was strong evidence for criterion 5, that of creative productivity.

Another rule that was uniquely Kanzi’s occurred in the formation of action-action utterances. The putting together of two action terms, such as tickle-bite was in fact Kanzi’s idea altogether. Indeed, caretakers almost never used such combinations. In the few instances where we found that they did so, it was always in response to a previous action-action utterance made first by Kanzi. When Patricia initially looked at Kanzi’s combination of two lexigrams denoting action, she saw little evidence of structure. However, the combinations were so frequent and
so uniquely Kanzi’s that she continued to puzzle over them. Suddenly she realized there was an order of sorts. Kanzi tended to place the actions that required a greater distance between the two parties in the first position and the action requiring closer contact between the two parties in the last position. Thus orders like
Tickle bite
and
Chase hide
were significantly more frequent than their inversions
Bite tickle
and
Hide chase
.

When apes are playing (and other primates as well), they tend to move from distal to proximal actions. For example, in a Chase hide game, Kanzi would run away a short distance and then hide. The other party was to give Kanzi a little time before chasing to the general vicinity and then finding Kanzi and tagging him. Thus, in this case, the order of Kanzi’s combination reflected the order of the events of the game. This was true for other combinations like
Tickle bite
as well. When apes and other primates begin to play close together they tend to tickle first and then, as rapport is established, play-biting begins. This is somewhat like human roughhousing; it starts out gentle at first and more distal, then the contact becomes increasingly close and sometimes increasingly rough. Kanzi’s action-action combinations therefore tended to follow the etiquette of bonobo play and could be said to be bonobo-centric rather than anthropocentric. Consequently, this invented rule of Kanzi’s can be seen to satisfy all of the criteria for formal grammar.

Patricia’s analysis produced statistically significant evidence of structure in Kanzi’s utterances. He was developmentally delayed compared to a human child, but parallel syntactic structures were present. I must admit to having been surprised at the regularities that Patricia’s keen perception was able to extract from the body of data that we had gathered on Kanzi.

Both rules that Kanzi invented (the “action-action” combination and the “gesture follows lexigram” combination) have to do with coordinating actions in some way. While the first reflects bonobo behavior, the second, though arbitrary, is a way of structuring two communicative channels. Why is action-based ordering important? I believe it gives an insight into the way early humans might have imposed order on language as they invented it. Language almost certainly emerged in early
humans as their social life and economic subsistence activities were becoming more complex. Therefore, there would have been a premium on the ability to coordinate actions, and a simple syntax of the sort that Kanzi invented would have been an evolutionary toehold onto the more complex syntax that eventually emerged in modern humans. Moreover, the fact that Kanzi is able to invent such rules is strong evidence for the continuity theory—that is, the idea that the mind of man differs in degree from that of the ape, but not in kind. It also gives some indication of the cognitive substrate to language that might have existed in the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees. The more we learn about what the ape brain cannot do in the realm of language, the more we can pinpoint the specific kinds of skills that must have emerged in early humans.

One of Chomsky’s arguments for the innateness of language capacity in humans is the existence of common patterns within the grammars of all languages. Underlying this commonality, he suggests, is a universal grammar, the product of a unique language module in the human brain. I agree with Chomsky that
language capacity
is innate at some level. One would hardly want to attribute even partial linguistic competence to oysters, for example, regardless of their rearing. However, any argument about continuity between humans and apes adduces the fact that humans and chimpanzees share 99 percent of their genetic blueprint as a reason to expect a sharing of some elements of language capacity. Where I disagree with Chomsky is in his assertion that the structure of language is necessarily prewired in the human brain.

The analysis of Kanzi’s utterances shows that the ordering of action is important in the rules he invents. This ordering is likely to have been the case in human prehistory, leading to a common syntax that is influenced by the environment. Furthermore, just as there are environmental constraints on the way tools can be structured and still function, it is plausible that there are constraints in the way language may be ordered and still be comprehensible. The fundamental similarities of human grammars may therefore be the linguistic equivalent of fundamental similarities found in the cross-cultural design of vessels
constructed to carry water. When Chomsky and his followers use the term “innate,” they mean innate
and
unique to humans; for me, the term “innate” is simply a mark of our biological continuity.

As I suggested earlier, it is futile to ask whether apes
have
language, as linguistic orthodoxy demands. The significance of Kanzi’s possession of certain elements of language is, however, enormous. As the ape brain is just one-third the size of the human brain, we should accept the detection of no more than a few elements of language as evidence of continuity. In my view, we had done that.

With enthusiasm Patricia and I wrote up our results and submitted them to
Nature
in July 1987. “We demonstrate that an ape, in a communicative environment with humans, develops a productive grammar uncontaminated by imitations, and, most interestingly, invents primitive symbol-ordering rules that he has not been exposed to in his symbolic environment,” we wrote in our letter of submission. In retrospect, it is clear we should not have used the word “grammar,” either in our letter or in our manuscript. To the linguist it means only one thing: human grammar. We were therefore stepping into the linguists’ court, and challenging the cherished notion of human uniqueness.

We had shown the manuscript to Herbert Terrace before submitting it to
Nature
, because we valued his views. He liked it, thought it important and worthy of publication, but attacked it with a volley of small criticisms. Overall, he thought we had overstated the grammatical nature of Kanzi’s utterances. When the manuscript reached the reviewing process, some referees thought it too short to do justice to the work, some said it was too long for the amount of new information it conveyed, but all were either skeptical or downright scornful of our claim for grammatical structure. The manuscript was returned to us two months later, with a rejection letter.

We persuaded the editor to allow us to address some of the issues raised by the referees, and submit a new version. We should
not have expended the time and effort, for the response to the new manuscript was precisely the same as previously. “Overenthusiastic overinterpretation” was the general view, with few apparently able to accept the implications of our results: that humans are not unique in possessing a capacity for language, and are therefore not as special as most would like to believe. Our second rejection letter arrived in July 1988.

A year had passed since our first submission, and we had made little progress in getting linguists to take notice of what Kanzi was able to do. Perhaps we should have used the word “protogrammar” instead of grammar, as indeed it is more appropriate. But if protogrammar is appropriate for the primitive syntactical structures that Kanzi invented and used, then so too is it appropriate for children. “Comparative developmental psycholinguistics has been plagued by a double standard,” Patricia and I wrote later. “Because children ultimately develop language, their early stages are interpreted as having greater linguistic significance than the same stages in primates. When children make up novel words on a one-shot basis, it is called lexical innovation. When chimpanzees do the same thing, it is termed ambiguous.”
³
The double standard, I believe, is part of the linguists’ last barricade in defending the notion of human uniqueness. It is not science.

When our work was finally published, in a conference volume in the fall of 1990, it received wide coverage in newspapers and magazines. Indeed, the volume of publicity and its enthusiasm, while gratifying, was almost embarrassing. It also provided us with some response from our colleagues. “All the evidence suggests that the animals are using sophisticated ways to request things,” said Terrace, damningly, to a writer for
U.S. News & World Report
.
⁴
“It has nothing to do with language, and nothing to do with words,” scoffed Thomas Sebeok, in a newspaper article. “It has to do with communication.”
⁵
For once Sebeok and I apparently agree: Of course it has to do with communication.

Chomsky’s comment, cited in
Discover
magazine, suggested to me a lack of biological sophistication. “If an animal had a capacity as biologically sophisticated as language but
somehow hadn’t used it until now, it would be an evolutionary miracle,” he said.
⁶
How do we know that bonobos are not using these abilities in complex ways in the wiid, ways that are not apparent to us yet? The more we learn about them, the more sophisticated their communicative abilities appear. Would Chomsky suggest that an ape’s precise control of a joystick linked to a computer game must be an illusion, because they don’t do this in the wild? No, because it doesn’t threaten the uniqueness of human grammar, the last bastion of the discontinuity theorists and their peculiar creationist position.

Apart from these and other solicited comments in the popular press, linguists have been oddly silent in the scientific journals. Evidently, Patricia and I had been optimistic in expecting that data would overcome prejudice.

During the time we were trying to get our syntax paper published by
Nature
, we initiated a further major test of Kanzi’s language competence: namely, his comprehension of spoken English. The trial, conducted between May 1988 and February 1989, was an important milestone in psycholinguistics, because for the first time a direct comparison was made between an ape and a human child. Kanzi was a little over seven and a half years of age when he began the trial, while Alia (the daughter of Jeannine Murphy, one of my colleagues) was two years old. As the distinguished psychologist Elizabeth Bates puts it: “If we want to understand what an organism
knows
about language, isn’t comprehension the best place to start?”
⁷
We wanted to find out what Kanzi and Alia
knew
about language at these different ages, through an exploration of their comprehension of novel sentences.