First Alex the Gray Parrot, and now this: Washoe has passed away.
Washoe, a female chimpanzee said to be the first non-human to acquire human language, has died at the age of 42 at Central Washington University.
Not exactly. Washoe was able to imitate some signs, but this doesn’t constitute human language. Human language involves putting words into syntactic patterns, and these patterns show features like recursion and structure dependence. Washoe wasn’t quite able to do this, nor has any other non-human.
I hadn’t even realised she was still alive.
But then comes the good bit of the article:
[C]laims about Washoe’s language skills were disputed by scientists who believed that language is unique to humans. Among those who doubted that chimps could use language were MIT linguist Noam Chomsky and Harvard scientist Steven Pinker.
Chomsky contended that the neural requirements for language developed in humans after the evolutionary split between humans and primates.
Pinker contended that primates simply learn to perform certain acts in order to receive rewards, and do not acquire true language.
Nice. There’s a lot to say about Chomsky coming around to evolution, but I’ll tackle that a bit later.
2 November 2007 at 8:52 am
It’s obvious after 42 years of learning sign language and learning only 250 signs, with almost no sentence structure that chimpanzee’s have far less in the way of language ability.
But is there a test we could do to see if they actually understand what they’re saying, to us and to other chimps??