A Report to an Academy, 1980* H. S. TERRACE Department of Psychology Columbia University New York, New York 10027 T H E FIRST A C C O U N T of an ape who learned to talk appears to be fictional. In 1917, Franz Kafka wrote a tale about a chimpanzee who acquired the gift of human language. Recent research appears to have confirmed Kafka’s sense of what it would take to induce an ape to speak: . . . there was no attraction for me in imitating human beings. I imitated them because I needed a way out, and for no other reason . . . And so I learned things, gentlemen. Ah, one learns when one needs a way out; one learns at all costs. [F. Kafka, “A Report to an Academy.7 During the 63 years that have elapsed since the publication of Kafka’s short story, much has been written about man’s presumably unique capacity to use language and attempts to show that apes can master some of its features. Linguists, psychologists, psycholinguists, philosophers, and other students of human language have yet to capture its many complexities in a simple definition. They do agree, however, about one basic property of all human languages, that is, the ability to create new meanings, each appropriate to a particular context, through the application of grammatical rules. Noam Chomskyl and George Miller? among others, have convincingly reminded us of the futility of trying to explain a child’s ability to create and understand sentences without a knowledge of rules that can generate an indeterminately large number of sentences from a finite vocabulary of words. The dramatic reports of the Gardner~,~ Premack? and Rumbaugh5 that a chimpanzee could learn substantial vocabularies of words of visual languages and that they were also capable of producing utterances containing two or more words, raise an obvious and fundamental question: Are a chimpanzee’s multi-word utterances grammatical? In the case of the Gardners, one wants to know whether Washoe’s The research reported in this article was, in part, funded by grants from the W.T. Grant Foundation, the Hany Frank Guggenheirn Foundation, and The National Institutes of Health (ROlMH29293). Portions of this article appeared previously in Terrace, H.S. 1979. How Nim Chirnpsky Changed My Mind. Psychol. Today 1 3 (6):65-76. 94 0077-8923/81/036--0094 $01.75/0 0 1981, NYAS TERRACE: A REPORT TO AN ACADEMY 95 signing m o ~ de ~ i n kin order to obtain another cup of juice or water bird, upon seeing a swan, were creative juxtapositions of signs. Likewise one wants to know whether “Sarah,” Premack‘s main subject, was using a grammatical rule in arranging her plastic chips in the sequence, Mary give Sarah apple, and whether “Lana,” the subject of a related study conducted by Rumbaugh, exhibited knowledge of a grammatical rule in producing the sequence, please machine give apple. In answering these questions, it is important to remember that a mere sequence of words does not qualify as a sentence. A rotely learned string of words presupposes no knowledge of the meanings of each element and certainly no’knowledge of the relationships that exist between the elements. Sarah, for example, showed little, if any, evidence of understanding the meanings of Mary, give, and Sarah in the sequence, Mary give Sarah apple. Likewise, it is doubtful that, in producing the sequence please machine give apple, Lana understood the meanings of please machine and give, let alone the relationships between these symbols that would apply in actual sentences.6 There is evidence that Sarah or Lana could distinguish the symbol apple from symbols that named other reinforcers. This suggests that what Sarah and Lana learned was to produce rote sequences of the type ABCX, where A, B, and C are nonsense symbols and X is a meaningful element. That conclusion is supported by the results of two studies, one an analysis of a corpus of Lana’s utterances, the other an experiment on serial learning by pigeons. Thompson and Church’ have recently shown that a major portion of a corpus of Lana’s utterances can be accounted for by three decision rules that dictate when one of six stock sentences might be combined with one of a small corpus of object or activity names. The decision rules are (1) did Lana want an ingestible object, (2) was the object in view, and (3) was the object in the machine. For example, if the object was in the machine, an appropriate stock sequence was please machine give; if it was not in the machine an appropriate stock sequence would be please move object name into machine, and so on. A recent experiment performed in my laboratory* showed that pigeons could learn to peck four colors presented simultaneously in a particular sequence. Such performance is of interest as evidence of the memorial capacity of pigeons. It does not, of course, justify interpreting the sequence of the colors (A+B+C+D) as the production of a sentence meaning please machine give grain. While the sequences, please machine give g a i n and please machine give apple, are logically similar, they are not identical. It has yet to be shown that pigeons can learn ABCX sequences of the type that Sarah and Lana learned (where X stands for different reinforcers) or that 96 ANNALS NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES pigeons can learn to produce different sequences for different reinforcers. But given the relative ease with which a pigeon can master an A- B+ C+ D sequence, neither of these problems seem that difficult, a priori. And even if a pigeon could not perform such sequences or, as would probably be the case, a pigeon learns them more slowly than a chimpanzee, we should not lose sight of the fact that learning a rote sequence does not require any ability to use a grammar. Utterances of apes who were not explicitly trained to produce rote sequences pose different problems of interpretation. The Gardners report that Washoe was not required to sign sequences of signs nor was she differentially reinforced for particular combinations. She nevertheless signed utterances such as more drink and water bird. Before these and other utterances can be accepted as creative combinations of signs, combinations that create particular meanings, it is necessary to rule out simpler interpretations. The simplest nongrammatical interpretation of such utterances is that they contain signs that are related solely by context. Upon being asked what she sees when looking in the direction of a swan it is appropriate for Washoe to sign water and bird. On this view, if Washoe knew the sign for sky, she might just as readily have signed such less interesting combinations as sky water, bird sky, sky bird water, and so on. Even if one could rule out context as the only basis of Washoe's combinations, it remains to be shown that utterances such as water bird and more drink are constructions in which an adjective and a noun are combined so as to create a new meaning. In order to support that interpretation, it is necessary to show that she combined adjectives and nouns in a particular order. It is, of course, unimportant whether Washoe used the English order (adjective + noun) or the French order (noun + adjective) in creating combinations in which the meaning of a noun is qualified by an adjective. But it is important to show that all, if not most, presumed adjectives and that all, if not most, presumed nouns are combined in a consistent manner so as to create particular meanings. It is, of course, true that sign order is but one of many grammatical devices used in sign language and that it is less important in sign language than it is in spoken languages such as English. At the same time, sign order is one of the easiest, if not the easiest, grammatical device of sign language to record. It also provides a basis for demonstrating an awareness of such simple constructions as subject-verb, adjectivenoun, verb-object, subject-verb-object, and so on. With only two minor excepti~ns,~~*O the Gardners have yet to publish any data on sign order. Accordingly, the interpretation of combinations such as water bird and more drink remains ambiguous. One has too little information to judge whether such utterances are manifestations of a TERRACE: A REPORT TO AN ACADEMY 97 simple grammatical rule or whether they are merely sequences of contextually related signs. PROJECT NIM In order to distinguish between these interpretations it is necessary to examine a large body of utterances for regularities of sign order. The initial goal of Project Nim, a project I started in 1973, was to provide a basis for deciding whether a chimpanzee could use one or more simple grammatical rules. Our immediate aim was to collect and to analyze a large corpus of a chimpanzee’s sign combinations for regularities of sign order. Such regularities could be used as evidence of a chimpanzee’s ability to use a finite-state grammar. As puny as such an accomplishment might seem from the perspective of a child’s acquisition of language, it would amount to a quanta1 leap in the linguistic ability of nonhumans. As we shall see, showing that a chimpanzee can learn a mere finite-state grammar proved to be an elusive goal. Socialization and Training The subject of our study was an infant male chimpanzee, named “Nim Chimpsky.” Nim was born at the Oklahoma Institute for Primate Studies in November 1973 and was flown to New York at the age of two weeks. Until the age of 18 months, he lived in the home of a former student and her family; subsequently he lived in a University-owned mansion in Riverdale where he was looked after by four students. At the age of 9 months, Nim became the sole student in a small classroom complex I designed for him in the Psychology Department of Columbia University. The classroom allowed Nim’s teachers to focus his attention more easily than they could at home and it also provided good opportunities to introduce Nim to many activities conducive to signing, such as looking at pictures, drawing, and sorting objects. Another important feature of the classroom was the opportunity it provided for observing, filming, and videotaping Nim without his being aware of the presence of visitors and observers who watched him through a one-way window or through cameras mounted in the wall of the classroom. Nim’s teachers kept careful records of what he signed both at home and in the classroom. During each session, the teacher dictated into a cassette recorder as much information as possible about Nim’s signing and the context of that signing. Nim was also videotaped at home and in the classroom. A painstaking comparison of Nim’s signing at home and in his classroom revealed no differences with respect to spontaneity, content, or any other feature of his signing that we examined. In view of comments attributed to other researchers of ape language,” that Nim 98 ANNALS NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES was conditioned in his nursery school like a rat or a pigeon in a Skinner box, it should be emphasized that his teachers were just as playful and spontaneous in the Columbia classroom as they were at home. (A detailed description of Nim’s socialization and instruction in sign language can be found in Nim.12) Nim’s teachers communicated to him and amongst themselves in sign language. Although the signs Nim’s teachers used were consistent with those of American Sign Language (ASL or Ameslan), their signing is best characterized as “pidgin” sign language. This state of affairs is to be expected when a native speaker of English learns sign language. Inevitably, the word order of English superimposes itself on the teacher’s signing, at the expense of the many spatial grammatical devices ASL employs. An ideal project would, of course, attempt to use only native or highly fluent signers as teachers, teachers who would communicate exclusively in Ameslan. There is, however, little reason to be concerned that this ideal has not been realized on Project Nim, or for that matter, on any of the other projects that have attempted to teach sign language to apes. The achievements of an ape who truly learned pidgin sign language would be no less impressive than those of an ape who learned pure Ameslan. Both pidgin sign language and Ameslan are grammatically structured languages. Nim was taught to sign by the methods developed by the Gardners3 and Fouts:13 molding and imitation. During the 44 months he was in New York he learned 125 signs, most of which were common and proper nouns; next frequent were verbs and adjectives; least frequent were pronouns and prepositions.12 Combinations of Two or More Signs During a 2-year period, Nim’s teachers recorded more than 20,000 of his utterances that consisted of 2 or more signs. Almost half of these utterances were 2-sign combinations, of which 1,378 were distinct. One characteristic of Nim’s 2-sign combinations led me to believe that they were primitive sentences. In many cases Nim used particular signs in either the first or the second position, no matter what other sign that sign was combined with.12.14 For example, more occurred in the first position in 85% of the 2-sign utterances in which more appeared (such as more banana, more drink, more hug, and more tickle). Of the 348 2-sign combinations containing give, 78% had give in the first position. Of the 946 instances in which a transitive verb (such as hug, tickle, and give) was combined with me and Nim,83% of them had the transitive verb in the first position. These and other regularities in Nim’s two-sign utterances12 are the first demonstrations I know of a reliable use of sign order by a chimpan- TERRACE: A REPORT TO AN ACADEMY 99 zee. By themselves, however, they do not justify the conclusion that they were created according to grammatical rules. Nim could have simply imitated what his teachers were signing. That explanation seemed doubtful for a number of reasons. Nim’s teachers had no reason to sign many of the combinations Nim had produced. Nim asked to be tickled long before he showed any interest in tickling; thus, there was no reason for the teacher to sign tickle me to Nim. Likewise, Nim requested various objects by signing give + X (X being whatever he wanted) long before he began to offer objects to his teachers. More generally, all of Nim’s teachers and many experts on child language learning, some of whom knew sign language, had the clear impression that Nim’s utterances typically contained signs that were not imitative of the teacher’s signs. Another explanation of the regularities of Nim’s two-sign combinations that did not require the postulation of grammatical competence was statistical. However, an extensive analysis of the regularities observed in Nim’s two-sign combinations showed that they did not result from Nim’s preferences for using particular signs in the first or second positions of two-sign combinations.15 Finally, the sheer variety and number of Nim’s combinations make implausible the hypothesis that he somehow memorized them. The analyses performed on Nim’s combinations provided the most compelling evidence I know of that a chimpanzee could use grammatical rules, albeit finite-state rules, for generating two-sign sequences. It was not until after our funds ran out and it became necessary to return Nim to the Oklahoma Institute for Primate Studies that I became skeptical of that conclusion. Ironically, it was our newly found freedom from data-collecting, teaching, and looking after Nim that allowed me and other members of the project to examine Nim’s use of sign language more thoroughly. Differences Between Nim’s and Q Child’s Combinations of Words What emerged from our new analyses was a number of important differences between Nim’s and a child’s use of language. One of the first facts that troubled me was the absence of any increase in the length of Nim’s utterances. During the last two years that Nim was in New York, the average length of Nim’s utterances fluctuated between 1.1 and 1.6 signs. That performance is like what children do when they begin combining words. Furthermore, the maximum length of a child’s utterances is related very reliably to their average length.16 Nim’s showed no such relationship. As children get older, the average length of their utterances increases 1, this is true both of children with normal steadily. As shown in FIGURE hearing and of deaf children who sign.14 After learning to make ut- 100 ANNALS NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES CHILDREN DEAF 0--0 'RUTH'(H SCHLESlNsER mdalei) HEARING o A 48 - 46 - 44 - 42 - 40 - 38 - A .EVE* (bOIWJ973) A 'SARAH'(BROIW.1973) .---. 'FW~'(KLIMA +--+ "nLlCE'(HOFNEISTER.1972) a mwi, 19721 NIM 0 I CUSSROW SESSDNS Hew KSSKllS 0-0 x---x I 0- 4 MOEOTAPE Y Y R E S I D I A A A 6 34 II3 32 u w z a 36 I 0 20 - 18 - o A A 12 lo - m a A - + - - - -+/ -. 2; 4: - k A iB 32 l4 1 * / k*epqfx/ v? -\, ' :6 / / Y / Am' '0- 2b +,/ /A 4 1;' ' ' ' r 4 +- ,+/' ,/ ; ; + , / '0 / 1614 / i I 4 - / / 6 22 I A A J w I 4 2 24- a I I A 8 30 28 a 2 W 26 5 I A 4-A 318 0 4 ,n 0 -6 Lfl, O: ;2;"9 i2 i 4 416 i8 ,b i2 AGE IN MONTHS terances relating a verb and an object, as, for example, eats breakfast, and utterances relating a subject and a verb, as, for example, Daddy eats, the child learns to link them into longer utterances relating the subject, verb, and object, for example, Daddy eats breakfast. Later, the child TERRACE: 101 A REPORT TO AN ACADEMY TABLE 1 MOSTFREQUENT 2- AND 3-SIGNCOMBINATIONS 2-Sign Combinations play me me Nim tickle me eat Nim more eat me eat Nim eat finish hug drink Nim more tickle sorry hug tickle Nim hug Nim more drink eat drink banana me Nim me sweet Nim me play gum eat tea drink grape eat hug me banana Nim in pants Frequency 375 328 316 302 287 237 209 187 143 136 123 107 106 99 98 97 89 85 81 79 77 74 74 73 70 3-Sign Combinations play me Nim eat me Nim eat Nim eat tickle me Nim grape eat Nim banana Nim eat Nim me eat banana eat Nim eat me eat me Nim eat hug me Nim yogurt Nirn eat me more eat more eat Nim finish hug Nim banana me eat Nim eat Nim tickle me tickle apple me eat eat Nirn me give me eat nut Nim nut drink me Nim hug Nim hug play me play sweet Nim sweet Frequency 81 48 46 44 37 33 27 26 22 21 20 20 19 19 18 17 17 17 15 15 15 15 14 14 14 14 learns to link them into longer utterances such as Daddy didn‘t eat breakfast, or when will Daddy eat breakfast? Despite the steady increase in the size of Nim’s vocabulary, the mean length of his utterances did not increase. Although some of his utterances were very long, they were not very informative. Consider, for example, his longest utterance, which contained 16 signs: give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you. The same kinds of run-on sequences can be seen in comparing Nim’s 2-, 3-and 4-sign combinations. As shown in TABLE 1, the topic of Nim’s %sign combinations overlapped considerably with the apparent topic of his 2-sign combinations (compare TABLE 2). Of Nim’s 25 most frequent 2-sign combinations, 18 can be seen in his 25 most frequent 3-sign combinations, in virtually the same order in which they appear in his 2-sign combinations. Furthermore, if one ignores sign order, all but 5 signs that appear in Nim’s 25 most frequent two-sign combinations gum, tea, sorry, in, and pants appear in his 25 102 ANNALS NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES TABLE 2 MOSTFREQUENT 4-SIGN COMBINATIONS 4-Sign Combinations eat drink eat drink eat Nim eat Nim banana Nim banana Nim drink Nirn drink Nim banana eat me Nim banana me eat banana banana me Nim me grape eat Nim eat Nim eat Nim eat play me Nim play drink eat drink eat Frequency 15 7 5 5 4 4 4 4 4 4 4-Sign Combinations drink eat me Nim eat grape eat Nim eat me Nim drink grape eat me Nim me eat drink more me eat me eat me gum me gum me Nim eat me Nim me Nirn me tickle me Nim play Frequency 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 most frequent three-sign combinations. We did not have enough contextual information to perform a semantic analysis of Nim’s 2- and 3-sign combinations. However, Nim’s teachers’ reports indicate that the individual signs of his combinations were appropriate to their context and that equivalent 2- and 3-sign combinations occurred in the same context. Though lexically similar to 2-sign combinations, the 3-sign combinations do not appear to be informative elaborations of 2-sign combinations. Consider, for example, Nim’s most frequent 2- and 3-sign combinations: play me and play me Nim. Combining Nim with play me to produce the 3-sign combination, play me Nim, adds a redundant proper noun to a personal pronoun. Repetition is another characteristic of Nim’s 3-sign combinations, for example, eat Nim eat, and nut Nim nut. In producing a 3-sign combination, it appears as if Nim is adding to what he might sign in a 2-sign combination, not so much to add new information, but instead to add emphasis. Nim’s most frequent 4-sign combinations reveal a similar picture. In children’s utterances, in contrast, the repetition of a word, or a sequence of words, is a rare event. Now that we have seen what Nim signed about in 2-, 3-, and 4-sign combinations, it is instructive to see what he signed about with single 3, the topics of Nim’s most frequent 25 singlesigns. As shown in TABLE sign utterances overlap considerably with those of his most most frequent multisign utterances. (Most of the exceptions are signs required in certain routines, e.g., finish, when Nim was finished using the toilet; sorry, when Nim was scolded, and so on.) In contrast to a child, whose longer utterances are semantically and syntactically more complex than his shorter utterances, Nim’s are not. When signing a combination, as opposed to signing a single sign, Nim appears to be running on with his TERRACE: A REPORT TO AN ACADEMY 103 hands. It appears that Nim learned that the more he signs the better his chances for obtaining what he wants. It also appeared as if Nim made no effort to add informative, as opposed to redundant, signs in satisfying his teacher’s demand that he sign. The most dramatic difference between Nim’s and a child’s use of language was revealed in a painstaking analysis of videotapes of Nim’s and his teacher’s signing. These tapes revealed much about the nature of Nim’s signing that could not be seen with the naked eye. Indeed they were so rich in information that it took as much as one hour to transcribe a single minute of tape. Terrace et a l l 4 showed that Nim’s signing with his teachers bore only a superficial resemblance to a child’s conversations with his or her parents. What is more, only 12% of Nim’s utterances were spontaneous. That is, only 12% were not preceded by a teacher’s utterance. A significantly larger proportion of a child’s utterances is spontaneous. In addition to differences in spontaneity, there were differences in TABLE 3 25 MOSTFREQUENT SIGNS* Sign Tokens hug play finish eat dirty drink out Nirn open tickle bite shoe pants red sorry angry me banana nut down toothbrush hand cream more grape sweet 1.650 1,545 1,103 95 1 788 712 615 613 554 414 407 40 5 372 380 366 354 351 348 328 316 302 30 1 30 1 239 236 *July 5, 1976-February 7, 1977. 104 ANNALS NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES creativity. As a child gets older, the proportion of utterances that are full or partial imitations of the parent’s prior utterance(s)decreases from less than 20% at 21 months to almost zero by the time the child is 3 years 0ld.1~When Nim was 26 months old, 38Yo of his utterances were full or partial imitations of his teacher’s. By the time he was 44 months old, the proportion had risen to 54%. A doctoral dissertation by Richard Sanders18 showed that the function of Nim’s imitative utterances differed from those of a child’s imitative utterances. Bloom and her associates19 have observed that children imitated their parents’s utterances mainly when they were learning new words or new syntactic structures. Sanders found no evidence for either of these imitative functions in Nim’s imitative utterances. As children imitate fewer of their parents’ utterances, they begin to expand upon what they hear their parents say. At 21 months, 22% of a child’s utterances add at least one word to the parent’s prior utterance; at 36 months, 42% are expansions of the parent’s prior utterance. Fewer than 10% of Nim’s utterances recorded during 22 months of videotaping (the last 22 months of the project) were expansions. Like the mean length of his utterances, this value remained fairly constant. The videotapes showed another distinctive feature of Nim’s conversations that we could not see with the naked eye. He was as likely to interrupt his teacher’s signing as not. In contrast, children interrupt their parents so rarely (so long as no other speakers are present) that interruptions are all but ignored in studies of their language development. A child learns readily what one takes for granted in a two-way conversation: each speaker adds information to the preceding utterance and each speaker takes a turn in holding the floor. Nim rarely added information and showed no evidence of turn-taking. None of the features of Nim’s discourse - his lack of spontaneity, his partial imitation of his teacher’s signing, his tendency to interrupt - had been noticed by any of his teachers or by the many expert observers who had watched Nim sign. Once I was sure that Nim was not imitating precisely what his teacher had just signed, I felt that it was less important to record the teachers’ signs than it was to capture as much as I could about Nim’s signing: the context and specific physical movements, what hand he signed with, the order of his signs, and their appropriateness. But even if one wanted to record the teacher’s signs, limitations of attention span would make it too difficult to remember all of the significant features of both the teacher’s and Nim’s signs. Once he knew what to look for, the contribution of the teacher was easy to see, embarrasingly enough, in still photographs that we had looked at for years. Consider, for example, Nim’s signing the sequence TERRACE: A REPORT TO AN ACADEMY 105 me hug cut as shown in FIGURE 2. At first, these photographs (and many others) seemed to provide clear examples of spontaneous and meaningful combinations. But just as analyses of our videotapes provided evidence of a relationship between Nim’s signing and the teacher’s prior 2 revealed a previously unnoticed signing, a re-examination of FIGURE contribution of the teacher’s signing. She signed you while Nim was signing me and signed who while he was signing cut. While Nim was signing hug, his teacher held her hand in the “n”-hand configuration, a prompt for the sign Nim. Because these were the only photographs taken of this sequence, we cannot specify just when the teacher began her signs. It is not clear, for example, whether the teacher signed you simultaneously or immediately prior to Nim’s me. It is, however, unlikely that the teacher signed who? after Nim signed cut. A few moments before these photographs were taken the teacher repeatedly quizzed Nim as to the contents of the cat box by signing who? At the very least, Nim’s sequence, me hug cut, cannot be interpreted as a spontaneous combination of three signs. FIGURE 2. Nim signing the linear combination, me hug cut, to his teacher (Susan Quinby). (Photographed in classroom by H.S. Terrace.) 106 ANNALS NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES There remain other differences between Nim’s and a child’s signing that need to be explored. One important question is how similar are the contents of a chimpanzee’s and a child’s utterances, whether or not they are structured grammatically? A cursory examination of corpora of children’s utterances20 indicates that chimpanzees and children differ markedly with respect to the variety of the utterances they make. While children produce certain routine combinations, they are relatively infrequent. Nim’s utterances, on the other hand, showed a high frequency of routine combinations (e.g., play me, me Nirn; see TABLE 1 for additional examples). It also remains to be shown that the patterns of vocal discourse observed between a hearing parent and a hearing child are similar to the patterns of signing discourse that obtain between a deaf parent and a deaf child. Videotapes of such discourse are now available from a number of s0urces.2~-~~ CRITICISMS OF PROJECT NIM Of more immediate concern is the generality of the conclusions drawn about Nim’s signing. This issue can be approached in two ways. One is to consider the methodological weaknesses of Project Nim and to pursue their implications. The other is to recognize that, methodological weaknesses notwithstanding, it is reasonable to ask if all signing apes sign because they are coaxed to do so by the teachers and how much sign-for-signoverlap exists between the teacher’s and the ape’s signing? Consider first some of the questions raised about Project Nim. It has been said that Nim was taught by too many teachers (60 in all), that his teachers were not fluent enough in ASL, that terminating Nim’s training at the age of 44 months prevented his teachers from developing Nim’s full linguistic competence, and that Nim may simply have been a dumb chimp (e.g., quotes of other researchers studying language in apes as reported by Bazar”). Aside from the speculation that Nim may have been a dumb chimp, I believe that all of these criticisms are valid. And, if questioning Nim’s intelligence is simply a nasty way of asking whether an N of 1 is an adequate basis for forming a general conclusion about an ape’s grammatical competence, I would readily admit that it is not. A case can be made, however, that most of the methodological inadequacies of Project Nim have been exaggerated and, in any event, that they are hardly unique to Project Nim. Though Nim was taught by 60 teachers, he spent most of his time in the presence of a core group of 8 teachers: (Stephanie LaFarge, Laura Petitto, Amy Schachter, Walter Benesch, Bill Tynan, Joyce Butler, Dick Sanders, and myself). As described in Nim (see TERRACE: A REPORT TO AN ACADEMY 107 especially Appendix B),12 many of Nim’s 60 teachers served as occasional playmates rather than as regular teachers. Nevertheless, they were each listed as a teacher. The Gardners have yet to publish a full list of the teachers who worked with Washoe. Roger Fouts, however, estimates that their number was approximately 40. Of greater importance is Fouts’s observation that, during Washoe’s 4 years in Reno, Nevada, she was looked after mainly by a small group of 6 core teachers. Francine Patterson’s doctoral dissertation presents data provided by 20 teachers during the 3 year period in which they worked with “Koko.” This is hardly surprising. It was difficult for an ape’s teachers to sustain the energy needed to carry out lesson plans, to engage its attention, to stimulate it to sign, and to record what it signed for more than 3 to 4 hours a day. A 3- to 4-hour session with Nim also entailed an additional 1 or 2 hours needed to transcribe the audio casette on which the teacher dictated information about Nim’s signing and to write a report. At least 6 full-time people would be needed to carry out such a schedule on a 16-hour/day, 7-day/week basis. As far as I know, no project has been able to afford the salaries of such a staff. Accordingly, it is necessary to make do with a large contingent of part-time volunteers. Both Patterson and Fouts speak English while signing with their apes. Films of the Gardners and Fouts signing with Washoe, of Fouts signing with “Ally” and “Booee” (two resident chimpanzees of the Oklahomas Center for Primate Research), and of Francine Patterson signing with Koko make clear that none of these researchers use Ameslan. As mentioned earlier, pidgin sign seems to be the prevalent form of communication on all projects attempting to teach apes to use sign language. Washoe is now 15, Koko is 9, and Ally is 9 years old. I know of no evidence that their linguistic skills increased as they became older. An ape’s intelligence undoubtedly increases after infancy. One must, however, also keep in mind that as an ape gets older, its ability to master its environment by physical means also increases. An ape’s increasing strength and its recognition that it can get its way without signing should result in less motivation to sign and a reduction in its teacher’s dominance. I am therefore skeptical of conjectures that an ape’s increasing intelligence would manifest itself in a more sophisticated use of language. THEGENEFWLITY OF THE CONCLUSIONS OF PROJECT NIM Whatever the shortcomings of Project Nim, it should be recognized that they are irrelevant to the following hypothesis about an ape’s use of signs. An ape signs mainly in response to his teachers’ urgings, in order 108 ANNALS NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES to obtain certain objects or activities. Combinations of signs are not used creatively to generate particular meanings. Instead, they are used for emphasis or in response to the teacher’s unwitting demands that the ape produce as many contextually relevant signs as possible. The validity of this hypothesis rests simply on the conformity of data obtained from other signing apes. Finding such data has proven difficult, particularly because discourse analyses of other signing apes have yet to be published. Also, as mentioned earlier, published accounts of an ape’s combinations of signs have centered around anecdotes and not around exhaustive listings of all combinations. One can, however, obtain some insight into the nature of signing by other apes by looking at films and videotape transcripts of their signing. Two films made by the Gardners of Washoe’s signing, a doctoral dissertation by Lyn Miles24(which contains four videotape transcripts of the two Oklahoma chimps, Ally and Booee), and a recently released film, “Koko, the Talking Gorilla,” all support the hypothesis that the teacher’s coaxing and cuing have played much greater roles in so-called “conversations” with chimpanzees than was previously recognized. In “The First Signs of Washoe,” a film produced for the “Nova” television series, Beatrice Gardner can be seen signing What time now?, an utterance that Washoe interrupts to sign, time eat, time eat. A longer version of the same exchange shown in the second film, “Teaching Sign Language to the Chimpanzee Washoe,” began with Gardner signing eat me, more me, after which Washoe gave her something to eat. Then she signed thank you -and asked what time now? Washoe’s response time eat, time eat can hardly be considered spontaneous, since Gardner had just used the same signs and Washoe was offering a direct answer to her question. The potential for misinterpreting an ape’s signing because of inadequate reporting is made plain by another example in both films. Washoe is conversing with her teacher, Susan Nichols, who shows the chimp a tiny doll in a cup. Nichols points to the cup and signs that; Washoe signs baby. Nichols brings the cup and doll closer to Washoe, allowing her to touch them, slowly pulls them away, and then signs that while pointing to the cup. Washoe signs in and looks away. Nichols brings the cup with the doll closer to Washoe again, who looks at the two objects once more, and signs baby. Then, as she brings the cup still closer, Washoe signs in. That, signs Nichols, and points to the cup; my drink, signs Washoe. Given these facts, there is no basis to refer to Washoe’s utterancebaby in baby in my drink-as either a spontaneous or a creative use of “in” as a preposition joining two objects. It is actually a “run on” sequence with very little relationship between its parts. Only the last two 109 TERRACE: A REPORT T O AN ACADEMY signs were uttered without prompting from the teacher. Moreover, the sequence of the prompts (pointing to the doll, and then pointing to the cup) follows the order called for in contructing an English prepositional phrase. In short, discourse analysis makes Washoe’s linguistic achievement less remarkable than it might seem at first. In commenting about the fact that Koko’s mean length of utterances (MLU) was low in comparison with that of both hearing and deaf children, Francine Patterson speculates, in her doctoral dissertation, that, “This probably reflects a species difference in syntactic and/or sequential processing abilities” (Reference 2 5 , page 153). Patterson goes on to observe that, “The majority of Koko’s utterances were not spontaneous, but elicited by questions from her teachers and companions. My interactions with Koko were often characterized by frequent questions such as ‘What’s this?’ ” (Reference 25, page 153). Four transcripts appended to Lyn Miles’ dissertation provided me with a basis for performing a discourse analysis of the signing of two other chimpanzees, Ally and Boee. Each transcript presents an exhaustive account of one of these chimps signing with one of two trainers: Rogert Fouts and Joe Couch. The MLU and summaries of the discourse analysis of each tape is shown in TABLE 4. TABLES 5 and 6 show exhaustive summaries of two conversations, one from a session with the hghest MLU and one from a session with the highest percentage of adjacent utterances that were novel. The novel utterances are very similar to Nim’s run-on sequences. They also overlap considerably with adjacent utterances that were expansions and with noncontingent utterances. In his discussion of communicating with an animal, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein cautions that apparent instances of an animal using human language may prove to be a “game” that is played by simpler rules. Nim’s, Washoe’s, Ally’s, Booee’s, and Koko’s use of signs suggests a TABLE 4 SUMMARYOF ALLYAND BOOEETRANSCRIPTS Video Taoe Number Number of utterances MLU % Adjacent % Imitations: Yo Expansions % Novel YO Noncontingent 3 4 5 6 Mean 38 1.63 76.3 13.6 7.89 55.3 23.7 79 1.52 93.7 22.8 7.59 63.3 6.3 102 2.25 77.4 7.84 13.7 55.9 2.6 72 1.93 86.1 8.33 4.16 73.6 3.9 72.75 1.85 83.4 13.03 8.34 62.3 16.6 110 ANNALS NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES TABLE 5 CONVERSATION NUMBER 4: ROGERAND ALLY c Adjacent Utterances (N = 7 4 = 67, ? = 7)’ Novel (N = 50: C = 43, ? = 7) 14 Roger 9 Roger tickle Ally 3 Roger tickle 1 tickle Roger 1 tickle 1 Roger Tickle Ally hurry 2 George 7 Joe 1 string Expansions (N = 6: C = 6) 1 George smell Roger I tickle hurry 1 Roger tickle Imitations (N = 18: C = 18) 5 Roger 2 tickle 1 Roger tickle Ally 2 shoe tickle 1 shoe tickle Noncontingent utterances (h’ = 5) 2 Joe 1 you tickle that that that box that shoe Roger string George comb good food-eat Ally 2 Roger tickle Ally Roger tickle Roger comb Roger tickle Roger 1 1 1 baby pillow comb pull 1 1 2 shoe pillow 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 * C denotes the number of utterances that followed teachers’ commands; “?”denotes the number that followed teachers’ questions. type of interaction between an ape and its trainer that has little to do with human language. In each instance the sole function of the ape’s signing appears to be to request various rewards that can be obtained only by signing. Little, if any, evidence is available that an ape signs in order to exchange information with its trainer, as opposed to simply demanding some object or activity. In a typical exchange the teacher first tries to interest the ape in some object or activity such as looking at a picture book, drawing, or playing catch. Typically, the ape tries to engage in such activities without signing. The teacher then tries to initiate signing by asking questions such as what that?, what you want?, who’s book?, and ball red or blue? The more rapidly the ape signs, the more rapidly it can obtain what it wants. It is therefore not surprising that the ape frequently interrrupts the teacher. From the ape’s point of view, the teacher’s signs provide an excellent model of the signs it is expected to make. By simply imitating TERRACE: A REPORT TO AN ACADEMY 111 TABLE 6 CONVERSATION NUMBER 6: JOE AND BOOEE Adiacent utterances IN = 79: C = 31. ? = 47). Novel (N = 57: C = 21, ? = ?5) food-eat Booee that 3 food-eat Booee 3 food-eat 3 1 you-food-eat Booee that Booee food-eat more Booee 1 food-eat Booee hungry 1 1 food-eat me fruit Booee 1 food-eat fruit Booee 1 that food-eat Booee 1 fruit food-eat you 1 food-eat fruit hurry 1 gimrne food-eat 1 girnrne 1 fruit more Booee girnme fruit hurry 1 1 there more fruit 4 hurry 1 fruit that Booee over there 1 that 4 Expansions (N = 14: C = 4, ? = 10) hurry tickle Booee hurry Booee hurry 1 1 Booee you Booee hurry girnrne 1 tickle Booee girnme 1 me tickle I me tickle hurry 1 food-eat Booee that Imitation (N = 8: C = 6, ? = 2) 4 that 2 YOU Noncontingent Utterances (N tickle Booee tickle more Booee hurry that tickle tickle gimrne food-eat food-eat Booee = more that Booee that Booee more Booee Booee you Booee more 1 1 1 2 Booee hurry there you girnrne you Booee you Booee hurry more Booee hurry tickle Booee tickle you me you there hurry tickle Booee hurry you there that there that Booee there Booee baby that more baby 1 1 3 1 1 1 1 3 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 that Booee that more baby there that there that tickle there you 1 1 1 1 1 tickle baby 1 more fruit there that that that Booee gimme gimrne Booee hurry gimme hurry that there 1 1 1 YOU 1 23) 6 2 I 1 1 1 1 2 1 1 1 * C denotes utterances that followed teachers’ commands; ”?”denotes utterances that followed teachers’ questions. a few of them, often in the same order used by the teacher, and by adding a few “wild cards”-general purpose signs such as give, me, Nim, or more- the ape can produce utterances that appear to follow grammatical rules. What seems like conversation from a human point of view is actually an attempt to communicate a demand (in a nonconversational manner) as quickly as possible. 112 ANNALS NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES FUTURE RESEARCH It might be argued that signing apes have the potential to create sentences but did not do so because of motivational rather than intellectual limitations. Perhaps Nim and Washoe would have been more motivated to communicate in sign language if they had been raised by smaller and more consistent groups of teachers, thus sparing them emotional upheavals. It is, of course, possible that a new project, administered by a permanent group of teachers who are fluent in sign language and have the skills necessary for such experiments, would prove successful in getting apes to create sentences. It is equally important for any new project to pay greater attention to the function of the signs than to mastery of syntax. In the rush to demonstrate grammatical competence in the ape, many projects (Project Nim included) overlooked functions of individual signs other than their demand function. Of greater significance, from a human point of view, are the abilities to use a word simply to communicate information and to refer to things which are not present. One would like to see, for example, to what extent an ape is content to sign flower simply to draw the teacher’s attention to a flower with no expectation that the teacher would give it a flower. In addition one would want to see whether an ape could exchange information about objects that are not in view in order to exchange information about those objects. For example, could an ape respond, in a nonrote manner, to a question such as, What color is the banana? by signing yellow or to a question such as Who did you chase before? by signing cat. Until it is possible to teach an ape that signs can convey information other than mere demands it is not clear why an ape would learn a grammatical rule. To put the question more simply, why should an ape be interested in learning rules about relationships between signs when it can express all it cares to express through individual signs? The personnel of a new project would have to be on guard against the subtle and complex imitation that was demonstrated in Project Nim. In view of the discoveries about the nature of Nim’s signing that were made through videotape analyses, it is essential for any new proiect to maintain a permanent and unedited visual record of the ape’s discourse with its teachers. Indeed, the absence of such documentation would make it impossible to substantiate any claims concerning the spontaneity and novelty of an ape’s signing. Requiring proof that an ape is not just mirroring the signs of its teachers is not unreasonable; indeed, it is essential for any researcher who seeks to determine, once and for all, whether apes can use language in a human manner. Nor is it unreasonable to expect that in any such TERRACE: A REPORT T O AN ACADEMY 113 experiment, ape “language” must be measured against a child’s sophisticated ability. That ability still stands as an important definition of the human species. While writing “A Report to an Academy,” Kafka obviously had no way of anticipating the numerous attempts to teach real apes to talk that took place in this country and in the U.S.S.R.3-13.25-28 Just the same, his view that an ape will imitate for “a way out” seems remarkably telling. If one substitutes for the phrase, “a way out,” rewarding activities such as being tickled, chased, hugged, and access to a pet cat, books, drawing materials, and items of food and drink, the basis of Nim’s, Washoe’s, Koko’s, and other apes’ signing seems adequately explained. Much as I would have preferred otherwise, a chimpanzee’s “Report to an Academy” remains a work of fiction. REFERENCES 1. CHOMSKY, N. 1957. Syntactic Structures. Mouton, The Hague. 2. MILLER, G. A. 1964. The psycholinguists. Encounter 23 (1): 29-37. 3. GARDNER, B.T. dr R.A. GARDNER. 1969. Teaching sign language to a chimpanzee. Science 162: 664-672. 4. PREMACK, D. 1970. A functional analysis of language. J. Exp. Anal. Behav. 4: 107- 125. 5. RUMBAUCH, D.M., T.V. GILL6r E.C. VON GLASERSFELD. 1973. Reading and sentence completion by a chimpanzee. Science 182: 731-733. 6. TERRACE, H.S. 1979. Is problem-solving language? J. Exp. Anal. Behav. 31: 161-175. 7. THOMPSON, C.R. dr R.M. CHURCH. 1980. An explanation of the language of a chimpanzee. Science 208: 31 3-314. 8. STRAUB, R.O., M.S. SEIDENBERG, T.G. BEVERdr H.S. TERRACE. 1979. Serial learning in the pigeon. J. Exp. Anal. Behav. 32: 137-148. 9. GARDNER, B.T. 6r R.A. GARDNER. 1974. Comparing the Early Utterances of Child and Chimpanzee. pp. 3-23. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, Minn. 10. GARDNER, B.T. dr R.A. GARDNER. 1974. Teaching sign language to a chimpanzee, VII: Use of order in sign combinations. Bull. Psychonomic SOC.4: 264-267. 11. BAZAR, J. 1974. Catching up with the ape language debate. Am. Psychol. Assoc. Monitor 11: 4-5, 47. 12. TERRACE, H.S. 1979. Nirn. A. Knopf, New York, N.Y. 13. FOUTS,R.F. 1972. Use of guidance in teaching sign language to a chimpanzee. J. Comp. Physiol. Psychol. 80: 515-522. 14. TERRACE, H.S., L.A. PETITTO,R. J. SANDERS 6r T.C. BEVER. 1979. Can an ape create a sentence? Science 206: 891-902. 15. TERRACE, H.S., L.A. PETITTO,R.J. SANDERS 6r T.G. BEVER.1980. O n the Grammatical Capacity of Apes. Gardner Press, New York, N.Y. 114 ANNALS NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 16. BROWN,R. 1973. A First Language: The Early Stage. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 17. BLOOM,L.M., L. ROCISSANO 6r L. HOOD. 1976. Adult-child discourse: Developmental interaction between information processing and linguistic knowledge. Cogn. Psychol. 8: 521-552. 18. SANDERS, R.J. 1980. The Influence of Verbal and Nonverbal Context on the Sign Language Conversations of a Chimpanzee. Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University. 19. BLOOM,L., L. HOODdr P. LICHTBOWN, 1974. Imitation in language development: If, when, and why. Cogn. Psychol. 6: 380-420. 20. BLOOM,L. 1970. Language development: Form and function in emerging grammors. M.I.T. Press, Cambridge, Mass. 21. BELLUCI, U. dr E.S. KLIMA.1976. The Signs of Language. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 22. HOFFMEISTER, R.J. 1978. The Development of Demonstrative Pronouns, Locatives and Personal Pronouns in the Acquisition of American Sign Language by Deaf Children of Deaf Parents. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Minnesota. 23. MCINTIRE, M.L. 1978. Learning to take your turn in ASL. Working paper. Department of Linguistics, UCLA. 24. MILES,H.L. 1978. Conversations with Apes: The Use of Sign Language by Two Chimpanzees. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Connecticut. 25. P A ~ E R S OF.G. N , 1979. Linguistic Capabilities of a Lowland Gorilla. Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University. 26. KELLOGC, W.N. 1968. Communication and language in the home-raised chimpanzee. Science 182: 423-427. 27. HAYES,C. 1951. The Ape in Our House. Harper dr Row, New York, N.Y. 28. TEMERLIN, M.K. 1975. Lucy: Crowing up Human: A Chimpanzee Daughter in a Psychotherapist’s Family. Science and Behavior, Palo Alto, Calif. Rubric for Discussion Assignment #2 Can non-human animals learn language? Summer 2016 Assignment  Instructions for completing and submitting the assignment     Read the Terrace paper. Follow the steps on each slide. Instructions are typed in red. Delete the red text and replace it with your answers. Upload your completed PowerPoint file to the discussion forum Evaluate at least one other student’s proposed experiment (see slide 7) and comment on it  Your response to their post should be at least 100 words Consider (Concept Map of Introduction)   Read the Introduction section of the paper and construct a concept map by defining key terms and creating appropriate links between them Fill your concept map with keywords that help you to understand the concepts in the introduction:       Make a note of the concepts that you need to review or study Define new issue(s) to be addressed. What was new about the research? Locate relevant variables and determine their relationships Design your concept map by going to the insert tab, clicking on shapes, selecting boxes or bubbles, and lines to connect them. Type the concepts that you would like to relate into each box or bubble Here is a link to an example of a concept map: https://library.usu.edu/instruct/tutorials/cm/CMinstruction2.ht m Delete this text and place your concept map here Read (Methods and Results)     Read the methods and results sections Describe how the data were obtained (type here) Define unfamiliar words here (type here) Create a simple visual depiction (flowchart, diagram, etc.) of the methods for the study (type here) Elucidate Hypotheses  Describe the major hypothesis (type here)  Describe what is being examined in Figure 1 (type here) Create your own title to describe the figure (type here)    Describe what is being examined in Table 4 (type here) Create your own title to describe the table (type here) Analyze and Interpret Data   Determine what the data mean. Relate the results to the hypothesis and purpose of the research (type here) Make at least 4 bullet points to summarize the conclusions (type here)      Read the discussion and conclusions sections and identify any differences between your conclusions and those presented in the paper (type here)    Can Nim Chimpsky and other animals learn language? Why or why not? Construct a logical argument to support your opinion using information from the Herbert Terrace paper and the Savage-Rumbaugh video. Think of the Next Experiment   Imagine that you are an author of the article just analyzed. What experiment should be done next? Design a distinct study to follow up:    Describe the purpose (type here) Describe the hypotheses (type here) Describe the methods (you can make a flowchart here if you wish)
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