Aping Language [Paperback]

This book is a critique of the experiments of recent years that tried to teach language to apes. A survey of the communications systems of apes and monkeys in nature finds these systems differ from language in profound ways because language is a uniquely human attribute.This book is a critique of the experiments of recent years that tried to teach language to apes. A survey of the communications systems of apes and monkeys in nature finds these systems differ from language in profound ways because language is a uniquely human attribute.This book is a critique of the experiments of recent years that tried to teach language to apes. The achievements of these animals are compared with the natural development of language, both spoken and signed forms, in children. It is argued that the apes in these studies acquired merely crude simulations of language rather than language itself and that there is no good evidence that apes can acquire a language. A survey of the communication systems of apes and monkeys in nature finds that these systems differ from language in profound ways--language is a uniquely human attribute.Acknowledgments; Part I. Background: 1. Introduction; 2. History of the ape-language projects; Part II. The Artificial-Language Projects: 3. The Lana project; 4. The Sarah project; Part III. Apes and Language: Ontogeny: 5. Words; 6. Sentences; Part IV. Apes and Language: Phylogeny: 7. Language, evolution, and anatomy; 8. Primate communication in nature; Part V. Conclusion: 9. The chimpanzee and the Chinese room; Notes; References; Index. Its strength lies in the overview it provides of the methods, theory, and results of this work, and in its potential to assist in bringing methodological improvement and conceptual clarification to future work on the linguistic abilities of apes and other animal species. American Journal of Primatology The strength of this book is that it provides a concise review of the theory, methods, data, and resulting interpretalÛ