2020/1 PSYCHOLINGUISTICS

CONCLUSION

The research with animals clearly shows that animals have only a rudimentary language ability. What is puzzling and requires explanation  is why their language ability is so low when their overall intellectual ability   is so much higher. Apes exhibit, for example, intelligent complex behaviour regarding social organization, food acquisition, and problem solving. And documented studies with apes going as far back as the First World War (the research of the renowned psychologist Wolfgang Köhler) demonstrate that they are creative and inventive in solving other types of problems. Why, then, are they not able to learn more of the language that is taught to them? After all, human children learn language (speech or sign) in all of its com- plexity. And why couldn’t the apes at least have learned to comprehend human speech, given that they have a hearing acuity that is as good as or better than human hearing? After all, there are human beings who are born with a deficit in speech production – the cases of Nolan, McDonald, and Rie in Chapter 1, for example – yet they can learn to comprehend language in all of its complexity.

Contemporary theorists basically offer two types of explanations on the

issue of animals vs. humans in the acquisition of language. Pro-intelligence theorists like Piaget, Putnam, and others, including ourselves, hold that animals lack certain aspects of intelligence that are needed for the learning of such a complex ability as language. Innatists like Chomsky, on the other hand, argue that the effect is due to animals being born without a special language ability, an ability that is little related to intelligence.

Chomsky has offered a very telling argument against researchers who teach language to animals. If apes really had the ability to use a grammar, they surely would have developed it on their own by now; especially with language being so advantageous for survival. It would be rather odd to think that an animal would have developed, through evolution, the highly complex capacity for language but would not have used that capacity until humans from universities came along to show them how.

Whether animals lack intelligence as the Empiricists say, or lack a special language ability as the Rationalists say, it seems evident that animals do not have much of a capacity for a grammar-based language.