1. Animal & Human Language
Animals and language learning
Human beings have language, but what about animals? Do apes, dolphins, or other creatures have language and use their language to communicate with one another as we do? How about household pets? If they don’t have their own language, can we teach them some sort of human language? But if they cannot learn human language, would this mean that they are lacking in intelligence, or would it mean that they lack physical structures that only humans are born with?
Curiosity and fantasy are the stuff that motivates scientists. Such fantasies are reminiscent of Hugh Lofting’s famous children’s stories of Dr Doolittle, the doctor who could speak the languages of all the animals in the world. This, for example, is the dream of one noted animal researcher:
I had . . . incredible fantasies about the possibilities of ape language. One of them was that I could go to some section of Africa where there are chimps in the wild and have Nim (the chimp to whom I taught sign language) serve as an interpreter for kinds of communication that are unknown to humans. That is, I would ask Nim, ‘What is that chimp over there saying to the other chimp?’ and Nim would explain it to me in sign language.
(Terrace, 1983)
We shall begin with a review of research that attempts to teach language to apes, a Pongidae primate family that includes chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans and is the most highly developed form of primate life next to humans.