The origin and evolution of language

Further experiments with chimps showed how important it is to distinguish between speech and language.

Twenty years later after the Hayeses’ experiment with Viki. Allen and Beatrice Gardner took another approach, trying to teach a chimpanzee named Washoe to communicate using American Sign Language for the deaf.

This language system uses signs for word who communicate in this way must have mastered the elements of symbolic communication.

The Gardners were quite successful, and Washoe eventually had over 200 words in her vocabulary.

She learn to use them in a grammatically correct way, she was also able to generalize.

For example, she learns the word for dog by being shown a picture of a dog. Since that tine she was able to apply that word to a live dog and then to the sound of a dog barking, even when she could not see it.

She was also able to express abstract ideas, as in her use of the word dirty to refer to a monkey that she did not like.

Recently, however, much of the research on chimps’ language use has been challenge by a study showing different result.

Herbert Terrace has argued that apes may learn words, but they can’t produce new sentences, as the Gardners and others claimed.

Terrace also suggest that most of the chimps’ use of language results from prompting by a human trainer, and is not a spontaneous effort to communicate.

Whether Terrace is correct or not, it is clear that there is a wide gap between even the most advanced chimps and average 3 year old human child.

In the last 20 years we have made great advances in understanding the human capacity for language.

The current controversy raises some important questions about how much we have been able to teach chimps; it is hope that future research will tell us much about language and it is produced by human brain.
The origin and evolution of language