Science: Are Those Apes Really Talking?

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Skeptics say it is mostly a lot of monkey shines

Laura, the teacher, and her young pupil are romping playfully on the lawn in front of their classroom:

Pupil (rolling on ground): You tickle me.

Laura: Where?

Pupil (pointing to leg): Here.

Laura (after tickling him): Now you tickle me.

Pupil (tickling her): Me tickle Laura.

This dialogue between Laura and her charge might not seem unusual, except for one thing: the pupil was not a human child but a young chimpanzee named Nim. Like several others of his primate kin, Nim had been taught to communicate with humans in American Sign Language, a system of hand gestures developed for the deaf.* He eventually learned to make and recognize 125 signs. But the frisky little chimp and other apes who have received such "language" instruction are now the center of a raging academic storm. The issue: can apes really master the essence of human language—the creation of sentences?

A few years ago, the answer might have been an unequivocal yes. After all, Psychologists Allen and Beatrice Gardner of the University of Nevada had managed in the late 1960s to teach the chimp Washoe to use 132 signs; the precocious animal was even credited with having invented a phrase of her own, water bird for swan. About the same time, David Premack, of the University of California at Santa Barbara, using plastic symbols of different shapes and colors to represent words, taught his prize pupil, Sarah, some 130 words and reported that she had also mastered some phrases. At the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center in Atlanta, the husband-wife team of Duane Rumbaugh of Georgia State University and Susan Savage-Rumbaugh, employing a language of their own invention, called Yerkish (its symbols are projected onto a screen when an ape presses the appropriately marked key on a console), even got two chimpanzees to communicate with each other in this artificial "tongue."

Perhaps the most impressive claims came from Francine Patterson, a psychologist at Stanford, who said she had managed to teach a hulking female gorilla named Koko more than 400 signs. According to Patterson, the gifted ape then proceeded to higher linguistic levels by using word combinations to insult her trainers (You nut), compose rhymes (bear hair, squash wash) and invent metaphors (eye hat for mask, finger bracelet for ring).

Though a few experts expressed skepticism, these claims of the apes' linguistic ability were widely accepted during the 1970s. But now many scientists are beginning to have second thoughts. They suggest that much of what the animals are doing is merely mimicking their teachers and that they have no comprehension of syntax. What is more, they say, the primate experimenters are probably so eager to prove their case that they often provide inadvertent cues to the animals, who quickly realize which "right" answer will bring them some goody. In short, the skeptics raise the possibility that the apes have been making monkeys out of their human mentors.