Kanzi: The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind (9 page)

It made no sense to me that if you held up an object and taught a creature to place its hands in a certain position when you did so, that somehow this procedure led to the magic of symbolic awareness and the ability deliberately to communicate ideas and thoughts to others. I felt that capacity had to be present already in the creature. Additionally, perhaps because I had a two-year-old son of my own at the time, I was beginning to recognize that something seemed to be missing during my attempts to communicate with the signing apes. I recognized that they could successfully request objects using appropriate signs, but I began to be uneasy about how much they actually comprehended. The unease would always emerge when I tried to engage in true communication, that is, when I asked them a question for which I did not already know the answer.

This missing component could similarly manifest itself whenever I asked the chimps to do simple things, such as to hand me a familiar object. Unsure how to respond, they would often begin to sign back rather than try to do what I asked. Similarly, if I asked them a question, such as “Where shall we go?” or “What shall we do?” they would frequently string together a variety of symbols they knew, particularly ones we had been using recently, in the apparent hope of hitting on one that sounded good to me. It was impossible to avoid the overriding impression that my son was far more deliberate in his attempts to communicate and that his understanding of simple requests and questions went considerably beyond that of the apes. The apes often seemed not to realize that they were being asked a “true” question, that is, an open-ended one that they could answer in any way they wished.

Of course, they were queried all the time with questions
like “What’s this?” “Who’s that?” “Where’s X?” but these questions always had a “correct” answer. That is, if asked the name of a person, the chimps were expected to produce the correct name. Questions such as these revealed little about what the chimp itself wanted or thought; they were simply rhetorical questions that required a signed response.

I began to worry about what this meant, and tried to talk with Roger about it on several occasions. Roger was never unwilling to talk about such issues, but he seemed to be of the opinion that it was more or less impossible to “get inside” a chimp’s mind and therefore the only reasonable thing to do was to take the sign at face value and focus on questions that had clear answers. Scientifically, I had to agree with his stance, yet I knew that if I regularly took such an approach to my son’s language, our communication would soon cease to be a very satisfying affair for either of us. It was important that he understand the things I was trying to tell him, and that he express his thoughts, rather than just answer questions designed to test his knowledge.

Then Pancho came along. Pancho’s imminent arrival at the institute caused great excitement because he was said to be a pygmy chimpanzee (
Pan paniscus)
, the rare and exotic cousin of the common chimp (
Pan troglodytes)
. Pygmy chimps, or bonobos as they are known, are more humanlike than common chimps in many ways, including being more vocal and more communicative and having extremely expressive humanlike faces. They are also less aggressive than common chimps and tend to be very friendly toward human beings, whom they seem to have a remarkable ability to relate to.

Therefore, even though Pancho was an adult male whom no one at the institute knew, I felt confident in taking Pancho for walks around the institute’s farm, and I did most of my observations of him outdoors. We even took rides around Norman, as I did with Lucy, and we stopped for root beer, hamburgers, and fries at an A & W. Unlike being with Lucy, I never worried about Pancho grabbing anyone who approached the car, nor about him taking the steering wheel. Often I even took my young son along; Pancho was such a gentleman.

Looking back, it was a crazy thing to do—and probably
illegal—but I developed a very strong sensitivity to Pancho’s skills and mine in our social and communicative interaction.

After six to eight months we discovered that Pancho was not a bonobo after all, but a Koola-kamba, which some have suggested may be a naturally occurring chimpanzee-gorilla hybrid, or a chimpanzee-bonobo hybrid. Bonobos and gorillas have many physical similarities (small ears, raised nose, large abdomen, shorter toes, for example). The fact that Pancho had been misidentified for so long is indicative of how few primatologists are familiar with bonobos. Had I realized Pancho’s true identity, I’m sure I would have been less willing to be so free with him, thinking he might be aggressive. Fortunately, I had experienced no problems with him. The most significant aspect of our interaction, however, was this: Despite Pancho’s lack of signing ability, I could communicate with him as easily and as extensively as I could with Lucy. If learning signing is about language, I mused, and language is about communication, why couldn’t I communicate with Lucy more effectively than with Pancho?

When I discussed these issues with Roger—about the apparent lack of comprehension and real communication—he insisted that Washoe understood what was said to her, and the younger apes would develop more and more comprehension as they got older. Okay, I responded, can you demonstrate that Washoe really understands requests that are made of her? Certainly, said Roger, as we talked sitting on the bank across from the chimp’s island one day. He turned to Washoe, looked around the island, and noticed that a long rope lay near the center of the island. Washoe, on the shore, was looking up at us. Roger turned to Washoe and signed, “Washoe, go get string there.” He gestured in the direction of the string. Washoe looked puzzled, but did begin walking in the direction that Roger had pointed. She looked at a variety of things on the island, touching them and looking back at Roger, as if trying to determine what he meant. She walked right past the string several times and each time Roger signed, “There, there, there (again pointing), there string.” Finally, as she again approached the area where the string lay on the ground, Roger began to
sign “yes, yes, yes” and nod his head emphatically. As Washoe reached the spot, she picked up the piece of string and was praised fulsomely. “See,” said Roger, “she just had trouble finding the string.” I was not convinced.

I soon became known at the institute as “the unbeliever.” It was a very friendly jest, and we all talked a great deal about my concerns; in fact, I was actually happy to be so labeled. When I compared my two-year-old’s language competence with the apes’, I still saw discrepancies that made me even more unsure about the strong claims that increasingly were being made for language competence in apes.

First, I didn’t have to drill object-sign associations with my son, Shane. Words just popped into his vocabulary. Second, I didn’t have to stretch my imagination to understand most of the things he said. They were obvious from the context. I had become uncomfortable and suspicious of some of the rich interpretations of apes’ utterances I’d heard or read. No juxtaposition of words was deemed too strange to be interpreted as a reasoned utterance. For instance, the suggestion that the gorilla Koko was making puns and other kinds of word play, and had a concept of death, strained my credulity—even though I wanted to think that an ape was capable of such abstract conceptions. Third, Shane clearly understood more of what was said to him than the apes did. I could ask him to do simple tasks, and he would. When I asked a chimp to do a simple task, even as simple as picking up a specific object in front of her, there was often puzzlement—just as Washoe had experienced with finding the string. It was clear to me—as it is clear to any parent—that Shane’s ability to comprehend language developed ahead of his ability to produce language. This seemed not to be the case with chimps.

I began to form the notion that comprehension, not production, was the central cognitive feature of language, particularly language acquisition. Comprehension is much more difficult to quantify than production of words, and so linguists had paid little experimental attention to it. In any case, the hegemony of syntax in linguistics ensured that production was held to be the defining characteristic of language competence. For the most part, ape-language researchers accepted what linguists
said, and then strained to satisfy their criteria. Seeing this, I became discouraged at the prospects of moving ape-language research forward, and opted instead to devote the rest of my time at Oklahoma to studying infant development. I wanted to document as extensively as I could, the type of things that apes could communicate by using their accepted nonverbal system of glances, gestures, postures, and vocalizations.

I met Duane Rumbaugh, of Georgia State University, at the 1974 meeting of the International Primatological Society, in Kyoto, Japan. By that time, Duane was two years into his ape-language project with the chimpanzee Lana, at the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center of Emory University in Adanta. In Kyoto I gave a paper on some work I had done earlier with Lucy, so Duane knew I’d had an interest in ape-language research. He also knew I was skeptical of some of the rich interpretation that was being made of apes’ language competence. Nevertheless, he invited me to a symposium he was organizing on ape language, to be held at the Southeastern Psychological Association meeting, which was to take place in Atlanta the following year. The paper I gave in Atlanta compared my experiences with Lucy and Pancho, and stated clearly that I saw no communicative advantage being bestowed on Lucy by her ability to sign. I was therefore clearly stating my position as an “unbeliever.”

Six months later Duane called me in Oklahoma with an offer of a postdoctoral position at Georgia State University. This position would permit me to study at the Yerkes Center. I accepted at once, because Yerkes is internationally recognized as being preeminent in primate studies—and it had bonobos. To Duane’s disappointment, I refused to work on the Lana project, and concentrated instead on studying bonobo behavior and comparing it with that of common chimps. Gradually, however, I was drawn into the language project, pardy because of various problems that had developed when Lana was moved to a new, improved facility; Duane asked me to help sort them out.

Initiated in 1971 with the explicit aim of developing
systems with which to teach language competence to severely mentally retarded children, the project had by far the most sophisticated means of symbol manipulation of all ape-language projects. The symbols were arbitrary geometric forms, which were displayed on a computerized keyboard. Lana activated a symbol by touching a key, which then lit up and was projected on a screen. As with all the ape-language projects at this point, Lana’s 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 competence
might 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?