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Here's your wiki for the Savage-Rumbaugh.

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This paper is a 'review of animal language research' (mostly apes). It showed that A) 'The ability to comprehend language is an absolute requisite to competence in productive use/expressions of language.' B) Training of animals (apes) in a social context was more effective than stimulus-response training. Kanzi learned what researchers were trying to teach his mother while he was still very young. He learned more than she ever did AND he gave no indication that he was learning it until after he was separated from his mother. He'd just absorbed like a sponge, the way human kids do. C) Apes can also learn tool use by observation in a social context. Kanzi watched an anthropologist create stone cutting tools and then tried to make them himself through trial and error. D) Most interestingly to me, 'language serves to make animals more competent in general - as though they understand more readily cause-effect relationships and how things work. Apes that had language skills were able to learn to use a joystick by observation alone, while apes who had little to no language skills required intensive training and observation. E) Apes were able to communicate to each other accurately with the symbols taught them on the keyboard lexigrams. They were communicating something that was too complex for their gestures to handle. It is suggested at the end of the paper that traditional learning, consisting of respondent-operant, add a third category, emergents since it has been observed that 'unanticipated competencies' emerge sometimes after long-term generalize experience and observations by the subjects

I understand the study about Kanzi. The one and only thing that I would like to bring up is that if he hadn't had learned while he was very young, he would not being doing these things. It is much like young children. I guess my point is if these apes were in their natural environment they would not learn how to communicate with humans in this way.

Agreed. One thing I've been realizing, that the article seemed to support was that evolution didn't provide us with language. It provided us with a propensity to acquire language. "The acquisition of language, whether by the human child or ape, is highly contingent on specific aspects of early rearing; and apes, if reared from birth in a language-structured environment (e.g., one in which language is used throughout all dimensions of their rearing experiences to the end of encouraging their comprehension and anticipation of all events), can understand hundreds of novel sentences of request that they hear even for the first time". We are not born with language. We are born with an ability and interest in learning it. If researchers want to teach other animals language, they should take advantage of the early developmental window.

According to Bickerton the conclusions are incorrect, right? I'm looking particularly to sentences like: "there is strong evidence that language should be viewed as a continuum" and "... the data vindicates the Darwinian perspective of psychological continuity from animal to human, a continuity afforded by biological continuity."

As far as I understand, I think Bickerton would disagree with the conclusions of this article. The way they word their conclusions, I partially disagree, but I don't discount the validity or importance of their findings. "At the dawn of a new millennium and consonant with Darwin's postulate of psychological as well as biological continuity between humans and other animals, there is strong evidence that language should be viewed as a continuum (Deacon 1998), with its fundamental roots being firmly planted most clearly in apes- our nearest living relatives (Andrewes and Martin 1987)". I think that the the evolution of language should be seen as the evolution of thought, combined with existing social behaviors of communication or interaction. I think of language as an emergent property of complexity, in which case, any single explanation (factor) for it's origin would be incorrect by itself. Bickerton's step by step rejection of singular explanations may be insightful and clarifying but at the same time overly dismissive of key contributing factors. So there probably isn't a //linear// continuum from modern apes or ACSs to human thought, but it's important to examine how each cognitive, developmental, or behavioral factor that contributes to language evolves, in any species that may posses them.

While Kanzi and other apes were able to learn some language-like skills, there is clearly a limit in their abilities. I was impressed with anecdotal evidence presented in the paper, tho, that said Kanzi was able to help new researchers find the lexigrams they were looking for. I would be interested to know if he picked up what they were saying vocally and knew the word or what the actual context was.