Free The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language by Christine Kenneally

tested. But because Terrace found instances of cuing, the scientific community and the public decided that all of the behavior was cued. There were, in fact, numerous examples of solid, double-blind experiments, such as one where Washoe was placed alone in a room. A camera was trained on her, and pictures were flashed up on a screen before her. The chimpanzee made the signs for every object in the pictures, and because she was by herself, cuing was impossible.
     
     
     
    Luckily for Savage-Rumbaugh, her funding had been renewed for five years just before the Terrace article appeared. She spent those years producing valuable findings. For example, Kanzi and Panbanisha have spent time with other apes in different experimental situations. For a while, they were raised with another bonobo, Tamuli. But while Kanzi and Panbanisha were exposed to language from the time they were just a few weeks old, Tamuli’s exposure began much later in life. She was initially reared by her mother, but at three and a half years of age she was allowed to accompany Kanzi and Panbanisha in their daily activities, like taking trips to the forest. Kanzi and Panbanisha’s human caretakers also spoke to Tamuli while pointing at the picture keyboard and describing their daily activities.
    Tamuli never developed language skills comparable to those of the other apes. In this respect she is like human children who, for whatever reason (for example, undiagnosed deafness or abuse), are not exposed to language at an early age. There is a crucial learning period for humans when they must be exposed to language. Even if they are neurologically normal, they will never fully acquire language if its foundations are not laid in this early period of brain development. Genie, the most famous of these cases, was kept locked in a room, denied normal human communication, and never taught language, and by the time she was rescued, she was unable to acquire much more than basic language skills. Her experience shows that if you are denied language, you don’t spontaneously produce it. Since Genie’s case was studied, it has become fairly well established that language is not innate in the same way as, say, our instinct to breathe or cry. Tamuli’s experience suggests that apes have a similar window of opportunity.
    Even though Tamuli could not relate at the sophisticated level that Kanzi and Panbanisha did, she at least seemed to understand that the keyboard was intended for communication. While the apes often tried to use it to relay messages, Tamuli’s usage was a bit like that of a young child banging away on a piano or a keyboard. She made no sense.
    One thing that Tamuli lacked was the ability to recognize that her interlocutors had separate minds and that communication with them could alter their perceptions. Kanzi and Panbanisha, on the other hand, seemed to have acquired a theory of mind along with language. When Panbanisha saw her trainer remove candy from a box, replace it with a bug, and then give the box—supposedly still with candy—to Kanzi, she called her “bad.” The chimp demonstrated that she could understand what was going on in her trainer’s mind independent of the reality and apply language to the situation. She herself scared Kanzi when she used language to tell him there was a snake nearby, when in fact there was no snake. Panbanisha used language to manipulate the contents of Kanzi’s mind, just as her trainer had manipulated the contents of the box.
    The ape experiments indicate how memory is a vital component of language use, even at this rudimentary level. A chimpanzee, Panpanzee, who was raised with Kanzi and Panbanisha, would sometimes make language mistakes that demonstrated a limited memory, such as when she was asked to put a sweet potato in the microwave. Typically in an experiment like this, an object, like the potato, would be made readily available for Panpanzee, placed right before her eyes. But in this example, the