2. Animal & Human Language
The first scientific attempt: with an orangutan
The earliest-known scientific attempt at teaching language to an ape was that of Furness (1916) in the USA, who attempted to teach an orangutan to speak. The brief four-month project ended in tragedy, when the animal died with a high fever while repeating the two words it had learned to say,
‘papa’ and ‘cup’. Later more comprehensive scientific attempts to teach speech to animals were made with chimpanzees. These were conducted by psychologists in the 1920s through the 1940s by two separate husband-and- wife teams, the Kelloggs (1933/1968) and the Hayes (1951). Let us now consider their research.
5.1.2 Gua: the chimp raised with a human ‘sibling’
Winthrop and Luella Kellogg (Kellogg and Kellogg, 1933; Kellogg, 1968) raised a female chimp named Gua along with their own son, Donald. Their idea was that by giving the chimpanzee the same input and social interaction as a human child, the chimpanzee would learn language in the same way that the human child learns its first language.
Gua, a female, and Donald, the boy, were born less than three months apart, with Gua being the younger. For nine months they were raised in the home as siblings. Initially on problem-solving tests and tests of mental ability the two scored the same, but over time the boy surpassed the chimp. The Kelloggs noted that Gua demonstrated an exceptional ability to learn by imitation but that the boy was more versatile and continuous in his learn- ing. Gua was raised in an ordinary speech environment with no specific language training being given. The Kelloggs wanted to see if Gua could learn language as ordinary human children do, where language training is not given.
Despite the similarities of their upbringing and physical and mental skills, Gua did not learn to say any words even though words were repeated numerous times to her in context. During the same time, however, the boy had become reasonably fluent in the spoken language, even being able to produce speech with some syntactic complexity.
However, the researchers reported that by 16 months of age, and over the period of nine months that she was with the family, Gua learned to respond appropriately to 95 spoken words, phrases, and sentences.
Her speech comprehension was, therefore, substantial. She could give appropriate behavioural responses to spoken commands like ‘Lie down’, ‘No, no’, ‘Shake hands’, ‘Don’t touch’, ‘Give it to Donald’, ‘Get down’, ‘Kiss Donald’. Quite an impressive achievement, even in the light of later studies, although it is not clear how well the Kelloggs controlled for environmental cues that could tip off the chimp as to the correct response.
The experiment was terminated, apparently when the researchers noted that Donald was picking up too much chimpanzee-type behaviour.