Nyelvtudományi Közlemények 85. kötet (1983)

Tanulmányok - Gleason, Jean Berko: Insights from the Extraordinary: Some New Trends in American Psycholinguistics 140

NEW TRENDS IN AMERICAN PSYCHOLINGUISTICS 141 that apes do not possess the kinds of neurophysiological coordination that is required in order to produce spoken language. Attempts to teach chimpanzees to speak had proven fruitless, but the tantalizing question of whether or not the higher primates possess the capacity for language at some level remained. It was necessary to find other ways to tap that capacity, if indeed it existed, since the possibility of spoken language had been ruled out. New attempts at teaching language to chimpanzees were made by Premack (1971) and Rumbaugh (1977). Premacks's subject, Sarah, appeared to understand linguistic and logical principles, since she learned to manipulate colored plastic symbols in order to communicate, and Rumbaugh's chimpanzee Lana actually used a computer console to send messages to her trainers. While these studies were impressive, the fact that the animals were participating in laboratory studies and restricted in both spontaneity and the kinds of messages they could produce had a limiting effect on the generalizability of their results. There were also some questions raised about whether these communications statisfied formal criteria for language. In recent years a research project more like the older naturalistic studies was conducted by Beatrice and Allen Gardner (1969). In the late 1960's, ethologists working with chimpanzees in the wild had noted their tendency to use hand gestures to communicate with one another. This finding coincided with a new wave of interest in American Sign Language (ASL), the manual language used by the American deaf community. Combining the evidence about chimpanzees' natural inclination to use hand signs with information about ASL, the Gardners initiated a research project aimed at teaching ASL to chimpanzees. Their first pupil, Washoe, became very famous indeed, and this chimpanzee's ability to learn many individual signs excited researchers and led to a number of similar projects, including one with an infant gorilla (Patterson 1978). These projects have resulted in immense intellectual controversy in the United States. The apes clearly produce recognizable signs, and those who work with them have tended to be convinced that these primates possess sophisticated language—some even go so far as to believe that their ape is capable of metaphorical language and abstract reasoning. A persistent question about the chimpanzees, however, is whether the strings of signs they admittedly produce are grammatical in the sense of exhibiting rule-governed patterns, and whether the strings become increasingly complex as they become longer. Most typically, attempts have been made to compare chimpanzees' acquisition of sign language with children's acquisition of spoken language, as Roger Brown did in his paper' 'The First Sentences of Child and Chimpanzee' (1970). Columbia University Professor Herbert Terrace (1980) set out to study a chimpanzee's acquisition of sign language developmentally. He adopted a young male chimpanzee whom he named Neam Chimpsky (Nim for short) after Noam Chomsky, and began to record all of the signs the young chimp made as the result of instruction by a dedicated corps of ASL teachers. At first, everyone was amazed and delighted : Nim produced his first sign (drink) when he was only four months old. An investigation of the later sign combinations, however, revealed no consistent word order, and very few 'sentences' of four or more signs (Gleason 1980). While children's very early utterances are clearly rule governed, this was not the case with the ape's language, which was composed of signs produced in all possible permutations. In addition, while children's utterances grow more complex as they grow longer, the chimpanzee's longer