Talk:Great ape language

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"Great apes that demonstrate communication"

The Great ape article (which redirects to Hominidae) tells us that humans are Great Apes. Therefore, this list should include a link to Human. --Dnavarro (talk) 17:58, 19 September 2014 (UTC)

Language of opening paragraph

I'm trying to achieve some neutrality in the opening paragraph, specifically the sentences stating:

"Research into great ape language has shown that apes can communicate in a primitive way. Gorillas and chimpanzees have been taught sign language and can communicate with tokens and lexigrams (keyboards with symbols on them)."

The above is biased because it strongly assumes that great apes positively are communicating, although elsewhere in the article it is admitted that notable scientists dispute that this is the case. The facts can be conveyed without the POV, if we state what is known... that the apes have learned these behaviors, and research suggests that they are using these behaviors to communicate. This leaves it open to both sides. The Hokkaido Crow 01:04, 2 August 2005 (UTC)

As I understand it, apes have not been "taught sign language." I'm getting this from Stephen Pinker's The Language Instinct and How the Mind Works mostly: the "sign language" that chimps/apes/etc. learned was a set of gestures linked to actions and objects. A typical utterance was "Me banana you banana me you give." See [1] and [2]. In contrast, real sign languages are not Me-Tarzan-You-Jane gesture systems but have the full grammatical complexity of spoken speech. Pinker discounts researchers' claims of the apes' achievements, citing suspicious concealment of data, and concludes that there's no clear evidence that the apes "get" the difference between "me tickle" and "tickle me." The apes seem to be able to learn some aspects of language, as parrots and dolphins have, but are missing the key concept of grammar. So, it's misleading to say that they know "sign language." I'll propose a slight change to reflect this. --Kris Schnee 21:06, 28 March 2006 (UTC) (former assistant of Irene Pepperberg)

Changed a line in the introduction that stated "they cannot use syntax to combine these symbols". This is highly disputed. Washoe the Chimp was fully capable of forming pivot sentences and Koko the gorilla invented new words by combining other ones. For example, she originally called watermellon "Fruit Drink" but corrected herself to say "Drink Fruit". This is argued to reflect a basic understanding of syntax. As I cannot find a specific article to cite this information, I have merely changed the line to read "it remains disputed." Please, do not write definitive statements unless you can find specific sources to verify them. 67.173.252.161 (talk) 20:36, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

Problems

• Confusion between natural communiction and modeling of human language in animals
• opening sentence with "lots of"
• entire article largely redundant with animal language, which is another article which also needs significant workSantaduck 22:29, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

One more thing: surely we should refer to each individual animal as "it", not as "he" or "she"? Manormadman (talk) 00:58, 15 November 2008 (UTC)Manormadman

If you look at other species pages, you will see that animals are generally referred to as "it". Jack (talk) 04:27, 15 November 2008 (UTC)

Multiple articles on this topic

This article is one of at least 16 articles on Wikipedia primarily about the fascinating but controversial subject of Great ape language. These articles have been created independently and contain much interesting but uncoordinated information, varying levels of NPOV, and differences in categorization, stubbing, and references. Those of us working on them should explore better coordinating our efforts so as to share the best we have created and avoid unnecessary duplication. I have somewhat arbitrarily put the list of 16 articles here and short remarks on the talk pages of the others. I would encourage us to informally coordinate efforts here. Martinp 17:57, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

• Koko (gorilla)
• Animal language
• Washoe (chimpanzee)
• Nim Chimpsky
• Primates and American Sign Language
• Chantek
• Great ape language
• Kanzi
• Panzee_and_Panbanisha
• Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute
• Loulis

(note I ran out of time putting notes on this on talk pages after I got here; will hopefully return when I have time or anyone else go ahead) Martinp 02:03, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

• Lana (chimpanzee)
• Francine Patterson
• Sarah (chimpanzee)
• David Premack
• Sue Savage-Rumbaugh
• Herbert S. Terrace

Coordination approach

Do we need a Wikiproject or shall we do this just informally? Martinp 17:57, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

I think doing it informally for now would be good. There really aren't enough contributors or articles to warrant a WikiProject as of yet. - FrancisTyers 18:02, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

Things to be done

(My take - changes welcome)

• Inventory the above articles on NPOV and tag as POV/controversial if appropriate (I'm not sure whether the "npov" tag or "controversial" is better, but let's choose one. I'd avoid "disputed", since I think the question is more one of controversy than factual dispute) Many of the above pages are POV in presupposing language use has occurred. One at least (the ASL article) is POV the other way. On some (e.g. Koko) a bona fide attempt has been made to be POV.
• Align wikilinks between these articles - most articles point to a random selection of the others; should consider what makes sense for each one
• Extract the good elements of the discussion of "Is this language use?" in several articles, centralize it somewhere (maybe here in Great Ape Language, there's a good start), and hammer out an informative NPOV version that describes the claims and the controversy pertaining to all the apes in question. Specific places where I've noticed good content (not exhaustive) are Great ape language (this article) and (to slightly beat my own drum) at Koko (gorilla). There is also good discussion on a number of talk pages, such as Talk:Kanzi (now beating FrancisTyers' drum).
• Adjust the non-NPOV articles to be NPOV (this is a framing, not a content question) and refer to the centralized discussion on ape language for details of the controversy (except elements specific to any one specific ape, e.g. signing instruction by Washoe to Loulis
• Try to find some pictures we can use within Wikipedia's licensing requirements
• Add elements about the question of what has happened to these apes after the "experiments" concluded -- see popular books by Eugene Linden, maybe there is more

-- Martinp 02:20, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

See also: Nyota (pygmy chimp), and animal language acquisition. I wonder if these efforts can be extended to the pages on animal language (or even animal communication) in general. Here are some non-ape animals involved in language experiments:

• N'kisi (parrot)
• Alex (parrot)
• Rico (Border Collie)
• Clever Hans
• Akeakamai

ntennis 03:24, 27 June 2006 (UTC)

"capable of using human modes of communication"

Given that "human modes of communication" include everything from meaningful vocalization, sophisticated syntax, alphabetic writing systems, and internet chat, isn't the lead sentence here a little much? It seems to set an optimistic POV tone from the very start. Marskell 16:44, 1 April 2006 (UTC)

Indonesian etc.

Just curious whether anyone has attempted to teach apes or chimpanzees languages such as Indonesian, that have a much simpler grammatical structure than English. I could see there being a lot of difficulties in understanding irregular past tense verbs, hotter vs. more beautiful (not beautifuler), that sort of thing. This isn't just a point for discussion - I would be interested in seeing this information added to the article if it exists. Mithridates 16:20, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

I am told that Chinese language is also much simpler than English.69.215.113.206 13:18, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Sign languages, while having a complex spatial grammar, have a relatively simple grammar when compared to English in the traditional sense. There is very little tense, and what tense there is, it's regularly expressed by adverbs and not tense, superlatives are all regularized with a secondary sign (in ASL).

The notion of an "easier grammar" or "simpler grammar" is entirely subjective from a linguistic framework. It depends on the grammar of the native language of the learner, and in the case of children without a native language, the reesults are always the same... every language is simple for them to learn.

Basically, we've given them a language where to say "I'm hungry" you just sign "ME HUNGRY" and they can't even get that consistently correct. The documented use of Nim Chimpsky gave us quotes ranging the entire range of grammatical orders: "YOU TICKLE ME", "YOU ME TICKLE", "ME YOU TICKLE", "ME TICKLE YOU", "TICKLE ME YOU", "TICKLE YOU ME". It doesn't matter how simple of a grammar we have given Apes, they have been unable to pick up any grammatically significant usage at all. --Puellanivis 19:56, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

As Puellanivis hinted, it is very tricky to tell when one grammar is simpler than another. Usually it lies with the individual speaker. One speaker may routinely use intricate grammatical rules in a language, which other speakers of the same language do not apply or are even aware of. The written grammatical rules you read when you learn a foreign language are always a small (but vital) subset of all the actual rules.

I have no references for this as it is original research, or, to use another expression, own experience. Mlewan 20:50, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Source request

This sentence — "The average college-educated English speaker has a vocabulary of greater than 100,000 words, which means well-educated humans learn roughly 14 words per day between ages 2 and 22, compared to the average chimpanzee vocabulary learning rate of roughly 0.1 words per day." — is sourced to Neuroscience, Dale Purves (ed), p. 591. It sounds like a remarkably stupid point to make, so I'm wondering whether it really is in the source. Can whoever added it quote what the source says, please? SlimVirgin ^(talk) 02:22, 2 May 2007 (UTC)

Don't know about the source, but it doesn't seem particularly stupid. It's just showing that apes aren't much good at learning vocab. Cadr 10:00, 2 May 2007 (UTC)

Today someone anonymously deleted the above-quoted sentence. It is my intention to improve it and put it back. In particular, the quotation marks above are mislocated, repair of which will be reflected in my new edit. The deleted sentence is 1) relevant, 2) important to the topic at hand, and 3) properly cited. I see absolutely no reason why it needed to be deleted.

Badly Bradley 21:09, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

I agree that the sentence is relevant, important and properly cited. However, it is still stupid. How do you count words? Is "tablecloth" one word or two? Is "the house" in English two words, while the Danish translation "huset" is just one? Is "I speak" in English two words, while the Italian translation "parlo" is just one? If it is just one, is then "parlo" and "parli" two words, or is it still one word, which correspond to three words in English: "I, you, speak"?

And how do you count how many words a person knows? I spent four hours yesterday trying to remember a particular word, which I would have recognised within a nano-second, if someone had spoken it. I would definitely have failed that question on a test, but can one say I do not know it? And what about all those words we think we know - at least almost? Or the words we know with multiple meanings? Do they constitute just one word? If a non-native English speaker knows that "bird" is slang for "girl", but he does not know that it also is a feathered animal, can we say that he "knows" the word?

Frankly, I do not know how to handle this in the article. The information that humans learn a larger number of "words" than animals is relevant and important. However, giving absolute numbers, like it currently does, looks naive. Mlewan (talk) 10:41, 15 November 2008 (UTC)

"This rate is not comparable to the average college-educated English-speaking human who learns roughly 14 words per day between ages 2 and 22.". How many 2 year old college-educated english speakers are there? Does a future education change the rate at which a human learns in the past? This is nonsensical.. I think we need more than one scholarly opinion here and there seems to be a trend in these ape-language articles of decidedly POV cherry picking of research in order to promote or advertise a more comfortable outcome. Are we aiming for honesty here or are we proselytising? It either needs to be balanced, or removed. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2.97.215.176 (talk) 02:51, 5 August 2011 (UTC)

Additionally, the reference is poorly formed (no chapter, missing the et al for the other authors) and for the reasons outlined above is suspect. Given that the reference is, allegedly, from the second edition and the book which is ostensibly about the nervous system which is now in the fourth edition, according to amazon, I think this needs to be corroborated. I wont remove it as I will assume good faith, but I do suspect the worst here. I think if this goes unchecked it should be removed by the next person to agree with me after a reasonable length of time. Additionally, if it has been dishonestly attributed the person who did so should be ashamed of themselves.

vocal cords

It says in the article that "non-human primates lack vocal cords."

This is not entirely accurate. A careful Google search will reveal that great apes actually do have vocal cords, but they are located a bit higher, and this is why they can't control them very well. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 89.123.37.95 (talk) 20:23, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

Hand Morphology and ASL

anyone got a source for the bit in the criticism section on native ASL speakers having problems with Washoe's use of sign language? It's just, the way it's written now makes it sound like a large part of the ASL speaker's problems had to do with Washoe's *articulation* of the signs, quite apart from the also-mentioned issues with the larger syntactic structure of the utterance. Thing is, chimpanzee hand morphology differs in significant ways from humans', and I'm wondering if that could have had any effect on Washoe's sign-formation, and if so if this effect was accounted for. --68.104.215.19 (talk) 21:41, 12 May 2010 (UTC)

On the "ASL" experiments, there was a real phenomenon that people who actually "speak" real ASL and use it on a daily basis with other people were consistently much more critical of the abilities of the apes to reasonably approximate ASL than observers who don't actually use ASL themselves were. AnonMoos (talk) 22:23, 8 July 2018 (UTC)

Limitations might be outdated

Just wanted to note in case someone can check this out - much of the section deals with apes never asking questions, it seems, however, to contradict article on Kanzi, in which there is a referenced claim that "Savage-Rumbaugh did not realize Kanzi could sign until he signed "You, Gorilla, Question" to anthropologist Dawn Prince-Hughes, who had previously worked closely with gorillas". Seems this section is from article on 2006 book (which has much wider scope) and supposing additional references are where the authors of the book got it from, they are from 1980s and predate this claim, even supposing it is anecdotal and Kanzi's researchers have no scientific proof of this, it still is possible that stuff has happened over last 20+ years 46.109.170.121 (talk) 03:40, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

Last sentence in Criticisms might need changing if a lack of source continues

"...ought to be[citation needed] ensuring that the main contact persons are all native speakers of the sign language,[citation needed] as it is otherwise analogous"

"Ought to be" implies a certainty about the theory that needs to be cited if it is indeed irrefutable.

It's also a run-on sentence and the metaphor is poorly worded.

Missing criticisms

All the communications system chosen for ape-human communications experiments lack the duality of patterning basic to human spoken languages and the multiple simultaneous componentiality common to human sign languages, which right away calls into question the word "language" in "Great ape language". The communications of apes also lack any rules of syntax in the human sense -- some of them can eventually kind of pragmatically learn to associate that the name of the doer of an action comes before the name of the action and that the name thing or person affected by an action comes after the name of the action (i.e. subject-verb-object for concrete observable items and actions, each referred to with a single sign or symbol only), but that's about it. There are none of the hierarchical constituents and recursion seen in human language. Extended ape utterances are word salad, in which the item that they want, the action that they want done to it, and the name of the person they want to do said action are jumbled together repetitiously but without any particular structure. Apes also don't really learn to take turns in a conversation, and the great majority of their spontaneous communication attempts are because they want something... AnonMoos (talk) 22:45, 8 July 2018 (UTC)

Current state of research and recent rewrite

Seems like earlier this year the article was somewhat rewritten to cast more doubt on earlier foundational research. I'm not sure that was merited. Anyone have thoughts? Andre🚐 23:53, 3 December 2023 (UTC)