Free The Articulate Mammal by Jean Aitchison Page A

EAT NIM, DRINK EAT DRINK EAT, NIM EAT NIM EAT, ME EAT ME EAT. Nim’s longest recorded utterance was a sixteen-sign sequence which involved only five different signs: GIVE ORANGE ME GIVE EAT ORANGE ME EAT ORANGE GIVE ME EAT ORANGE GIVE ME YOU. On this evidence, it seems incontestable that ‘Repetitive, inconsistently structured strings are in fact characteristic of ape signing’ (Petitto and Seidenberg 1979: 186).
    Terrace found a number of other differences between Nim’s signing and true language. For example, when Nim was just over 2 years old, 38 per centof his utterances were full or partial imitations. Almost 2 years later, the number of imitations had gone up to 54 per cent. Nim was producing more imitations as he got older, the reverse of what happens with human children. Nim was also unable to grasp the give-and-take of conversation, and his signing showed no evidence of turn-taking. Furthermore, he rarely initiated conversations. Only 12 per cent of his utterances were truly spontaneous, and the remaining 88 per cent were in response to his teachers. We may conclude, therefore, that Nim did not use his signs in the structured, creative, social way that is characteristic of human children. It seems reasonable to agree with Terrace that ‘It would be premature to conclude that a chimpanzee’s combinations show the same structure evident in the sentences of a child’ (1979a: 221) and that ‘Nim’s signing with his teachers bore only a superficial resemblance to a child’s conversations with his or her parents’ (Terrace 1983: 57).
    Somewhat surprisingly, this conclusion has been fiercely challenged. Terrace’s critics point out that Nim was a highly disturbed young chimp. Due to frequent changes in those who taught him, Nim was insecure and maladjusted. They claim that his achievements are considerably lower than one might expect from a ‘normal’ animal. Others have argued that a computer analysis of chimp utterances that takes no account of the actual situation is bound to give an odd result. Negative results are to be expected if one chooses to simply:
lump together four years’ worth of recorded utterances, remove all verbal and nonverbal context and grind the result through a computer to look for statistical regularities.
(Gardner and Gardner 1980: 357)
    The dispute is still unsettled, and perhaps will remain so, because signing chimps are enormously labour-intensive: every sign has to be observed or video-recorded. So alternative language-systems may be easier to analyse, as will be discussed in the next section.
    CONQUERORS OF THE KEYBOARD: LANA AND KANZI
    Lana, a female chimp, was the first animal to use a keyboard with visual symbols. She underwent rigorous training in a sophisticated environment – as perhaps befits an animal whose project was partly funded by the Coca-Cola company. Lana’s ‘cage’ at the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Centre in Atlanta, Georgia, was a room of which one side was a huge keyboard linked up to a computer. Beginning in 1971, she was taught to communicate bypressing the keys, each one of which was marked with a symbol standing for a word. A vending device was attached to the keyboard, so that if Lana correctly requested some item of food or drink, she was able to obtain it immediately (Rumbaugh 1977; Savage-Rumbaugh 1986).
    Lana acquired over 100 symbols in her repertoire, which mainly involved items and actions around her, such as ‘give’, ‘banana’, ‘Coke’, and so on. She could cope well with arbitrary symbols, since the symbols on her keyboard were formed by combinations of geometric figures on different coloured backgrounds. For example, a small solid circle inside a larger diamond on a purple background was the symbol for ‘Lana’, the animal’s name. A diamond superimposed on a circle inside a rectangle on a blue background was the symbol for ‘eat’.

    Moreover, Lana’s ability to generalize showed that her system had semanticity, that