Talking Apes

Happy Monday morning!

As you all know, I'm a linguistic freak, loving everything language based. For your morning today, I wanted to talk to you about whether or not any other animal can have language that is similar to ours. 

I'm going to get down to the real nitty gritty parts of language and so I don't mean speaking and speech. By language, I mean the ability to transfer a message that is meaningful, can be creative (new words added, new sentences never heard before) and whether they can refer about something from the past/not present in front of them.

There is only one type of animal that has the potential and perceived capability to do this...
Primates- our closest related relative. 

Primates without evolution are never going to speak to us, it's a fact.

The reason for this is that their physiological aspects of their vocal tract is just not developed enough to be capable of producing human sounds. Humans developed a vocal tract through the evolution of us standing up that elongated our vocal tract and gave us much more room to move our tongue to pronounce sounds.

Fun fact: a newborn baby's vocal tract resembles that of a primate and therefore is one of the reasons they don't speak- they physically are unable to until they grow and their vocal tract develops into that of a humans.

Many researchers over the years have managed to teach a number of Chimpanzees and Bonobos (a type of Chimp) to learn language by using lexigrams. (An electronic symbol board whereby the symbols do not match or have any resemblance to the word; these are taught and used to communicate.)

They have found that they can learn language and some, namely a Bonobo named Kanzi, have gone to extraordinary lengths to put together symbols that are taught separately in order to create two-word utterances highlighting the fact that they really understand the language. It's not just mimicking when they can create such language without explicit teaching.

Not only that, but there has been evidence that they understand the discourse of language in that we have set rules about the way in which we have a conversation for example turn-taking. This shows that it's not just a case of learning hundreds of symbols and words but rather they have learnt the internal structures of language that makes language unique...

This is extraordinary to me and to many other people that are interested in whether or not humans are the only mammal with language.

I have a video below that is fairly long of Kanzi using lexigram and language to communicate and if you wish to take a look, I'd be interested in your reactions.

I personally do not like that these Chimps have been made to learn language that isn't needed and think it is cruel that us humans are so self-obsessed with our own ego that we forget these animals have a life too. Remember, these Chimps have to endure hours and hours of intensive training all day every day for years; it's not something for their own benefit but rather for our own curiosity.

I hope this subject hasn't been too taxing on your brains this Monday morning and if it has, it might just wake you up for your day ahead :P

xxx