Headline, December24, 2013

''' SPEECH & LANGUAGE : 

^APES AND HUMANS! '''

In 1966 Allen and Beatrice Gardner, two psychologists at the university of Nevada in Reno, had a very bright idea. They were interested in the evolution of language and, in particular, in the linguistic capabilities of great apes.

Previous attempts to teach chimpanzees to talk had ended in failure and the matter was considered by most people to be closed. But the Gardners realised that speech and language are not the same thing.

Many deaf people, for example, are unable to speak but are perfectly able to communicate by gestures that have all the attributes and sophistication of spoken language. 

Given the very different anatomies of the humans and chimpanzee to sign in the way that deaf people do. And their chosen subject, a female chimp named Washoe after the county in which the university campus is located, proved an adept pupil.

Though there is still debate whether about what Washoe learned was really equivalent to human language  (for example, whether it had true syntax in which a change in word order changes meaning), there is no doubt that she learned a lot of words. She now has a vocabulary of about 200.

All of this, however, raises a second question. If Washoe and her successors can learn a complex and arbitrary vocabulary of gestures from people, do they have such vocabularies naturally?

To examine this possibility Amy Pollick and Frans de Waal. of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, have looked at gestures and expressions in chimpanzees, and their cousins, bonobos. In doing so they have added to the evidence that speech is a linguistic Johnny-come-lately. Language, it seems, started with gestures.

Time to Ape others: Dr Pollick and Dr de Waal studied four groups of apes held in captivity. Two were groups of chimpanzees, and two were bonobos. As they report on the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they videotaped the animals behaviour for several hundred hours over the course of 16 months in order to record three things:

Facial and vocal expressions, hand and foot gestures, and the behavioural context in which these expressions and gestures took place (eg grooming, play, sex and aggression). Altogether, they identified 18 expressions, 31 gestures and seven sorts of behavioural context.

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''' Saving Grace '''

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