Chimpanzee Baby Adopted By A Mastiff Dog

Scientists have long been fascinated with the studies of language, believing it to be a unique human cognitive ability. To test this hypothesis, scientists have attempted to teach human language to several species of 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 of 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 of success, including one involving a chimpanzee named, in parody, Nim Chimpsky, trained by Herbert Terrace of Columbia University. Although his initial reports were quite positive, in November 1979, Terrace and his team re-evaluated the videotapes of 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 of the experimenters, as well as mistakes in reporting the data. “Much of the apes’ behavior is pure drill,” he said. “Language still stands as an important definition of the human species.” In this reversal, Terrace now argued that Nim’s use of 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.
• Memory
A 30-year study at Kyoto University’s Primate Research Institute has shown that chimps are able to learn to recognize the numbers 1-9 and their values. The chimps further show an aptitude for photographic memory, demonstrated in experiments in which the jumbled digits 1-9 are flashed onto a computer screen for less than a quarter of a second, after which the chimp, Ayumu, is able to correctly and quickly point to the positions where they appeared in ascending order. The same experiment was failed by world memory champion Ben Pridmore on most attempts.