Great Ape Language - Criticisms of Primate Language Research

Criticisms of Primate Language Research

Some scientists, including MIT linguist Noam Chomsky and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, are skeptical about claims made for great ape language research. Among the reasons for skepticism are the differences in ease with which human beings and apes can learn language; there are also questions of whether there is a clear beginning and end to the signed gestures and whether the apes actually understand language or are simply doing a clever trick for a reward.

While vocabulary words from American Sign Language are used to train the apes, native users of ASL note that mere knowledge of ASL's vocabulary does not equate to ASL, but more closely reflects Pidgin Signed English which is not a full-fledged language. In the research involving Washoe, all researchers returned lists of signs Washoe used, with the exception of the one deaf native ASL user who reported no signs but many gestures. Native users of ASL make clear distinctions about what handshapes, palm orientations, and places of articulation signs must have to constitute linguistic activity. Signs must also be used combinatorially and in the correct grammatical sequence. Thus, apes are seen as attempting to approximate these complex rules but are considered to be failing because of such malformations in the production of ASL signs. A precondition for a successful experiment with teaching a true sign language to primates ought to be ensuring that the main contact persons are all native speakers of the sign language, as it is otherwise analogous to trying to raise a human child as a speaker of a language to which you possess only a dictionary—with mispronunciations and worst of all giving only a pidgin model.