Free The Articulate Mammal by Jean Aitchison Page B

is, she understood that a symbol referred to a certain type of object, or colour, not just one particular thing. For example, she was taught the word MORE in connection with an extra ration of fruitjuice. Within a few days, she was reliably attaching the symbol for MORE to other types of food and drink whenever she wanted an additional helping, as in MORE BREAD, MORE MILK. Lana also showed some evidence of creativity. For example, she was taught the words PUT and IN in connection with putting a ball into a bowl or box. Soon after, Tim, one of her trainers, was late with her morning drink of milk. Lana spontaneously made the request TIM PUT MILK IN MACHINE. This shows not only creativity, but also displacement – the ability to talk about absent objects and events. In addition, Lana coined the descriptive phrases APPLE WHICH-IS ORANGE for ‘orange’, and BANANA WHICH-IS GREEN for cucumber.
    So far, then, Lana’s language ability seems similar to that of Washoe in that she showed semanticity, displacement and creativity. Let us now look at the way in which she combined symbols. Was she able to cope with structuredependent operations? Clearly, Lana realized that symbols could not be jumbled together randomly. She learned to follow a set sequence in accordance with her trainer’s instructions. She could carry out simple slot-filling exercises, helped by the fact that in her symbol system, each type of word had a different background colour.

    It is possible, though unlikely, that she understood the notion of hierarchical structure: the idea that a group of symbols could be substituted for a single one without altering the basic sentence pattern. Her colour-coding system probably hindered her from drawing such conclusions, since in a phrase such as THIS BOWL each word would be a different colour. Furthermore, there is no concrete evidence that she manipulated slots in the way humans do.
    To be fair to Lana, however, we perhaps need to consider a conversation which she had with her trainer Tim one Christmas Day. On that day, she produced two similar strings of symbols (Stahlke 1980):
QUERY YOU GIVE COKE TO LANA IN CUP.
QUERY YOU GIVE COKE IN CUP TO LANA.
    This looks remarkably like the kind of structure-dependent operation performed by humans, in which they manipulate groups of words to produce different effects. But a closer look at Lana’s behaviour on that Christmas Day suggests that she was not as clever as one might at first suspect. She had begun by demanding Coke, using the first of the sentences listed above: QUERY YOU GIVE COKE TO LANA IN CUP. She repeated this demand seven times, with no success. Then in desperation, and once only, she tried another variant: QUERY YOU GIVE COKE IN CUP TO LANA. It seems, then, that such structural manipulations were not characteristic of Lana’s output, and this one probably occurred by chance. Normally, she adhered rigidly to the sequence she had been taught in order to get her reward, so she had little scope for stylistic modifications. On the basis of this one example, then, it would be premature to conclude that she could cope with structure-dependent operations, which are a crucial characteristic of human language.
    Lana’s trainers, incidentally, confidently claim that she had ‘language’, but they define ‘language’ in a much broader way than we have done. To them, a language is any communication system which refers consistently to the outside world by means of a set of arbitrary symbols which are combined together in accordance with conventional rules (Rumbaugh 1977: 66), a definition which might bring even a set of traffic lights within its scope!
    Austin and Sherman also deserve a mention. These two young male chimpanzees have been taught the same system as Lana (Savage-Rumbaugh 1986). They have surpassed her in one way, in that they are able to communicate with one another. If Austin presses a symbol for a banana, then Sherman can go into the next room, select the