Smoking Monkey

Studies language
Scientists have long been fascinated with the studies language, believing it to be a unique human cognitive ability. To test this hypothesis, scientists have attempted to teach human language to several species great apes. One early attempt by Allen and Beatrice Gardner in the 1960s involved spending 51 months teaching American Sign Language to a chimpanzee named Washoe. The Gardners reported that Washoe learned 151 signs, and that she had spontaneously taught them to other chimpanzees. Over a longer period time, Washoe learned over 800 signs.
There is ongoing debate among some scientists, notably Noam Chomsky and David Premack, about non-human great apes' ability to learn language. Since the early reports on Washoe, numerous other studies have been conducted with varying levels success, including one involving a chimpanzee named, in parody, Nim Chimpsky, trained by Herbert Terrace Columbia University. Although his initial reports were quite positive, in November 1979, Terrace and his team re-evaluated the videotapes Nim with his trainers, analyzing them frame by frame for signs as well as for exact context (what was happening both before and after Nim’s signs). In the re-analysis, Terrace concluded that Nim’s utterances could be explained merely as prompting on the part the experimenters, as well as mistakes in reporting the data. “Much the apes’ behavior is pure drill,” he said. “Language still stands as an important definition the human species.” In this reversal, Terrace now argued that Nim’s use ASL was not like human language acquisition. Nim never initiated conversations himself, rarely introduced new words, and simply imitated what the humans did. Nim’s sentences also did not grow in length, unlike human children whose vocabulary and sentence length show a strong positive correlation.