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Science

Evidence of Chimp Developing "Spoken" Language 53

Posted by timothy from the could-I-have-a-few-words-with-you? dept.
testcase writes "The New Scientist has an article describing a bonobo who appears to have developed a simple vocabulary. Researchers who have analyzed recordings of the chimp have been able to identify four sounds he makes in different contexts indicating 'banana, grapes, juice and yes.'"
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Evidence of Chimp Developing "Spoken" Language More

Evidence of Chimp Developing "Spoken" Language

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  • Or the way i can tell what my dog wants by the tone of his bark? I dont see how this is sutch a breakthrough.

  • At last, a female that just can't say no - only yes. :)

    • Actually, female bonobos are known for their hypersexuality:

      "Pygmy chimps are the opposite of sexually selective: females mate in sequence with many males, and there is much sexual activity between females and between males as well."
      -- Jared Diamond, The Third Chimpanzee [amazon.com]
    • How long until someone starts a dating service marketed towards geeks with this idea?

  • Evidence of Humans Undeveloping "Spoken" Language (Score:4, Funny)

    by bic2k ( 140221 ) on Sunday January 05, 2003 @08:09PM (#5022519) Homepage
    Recent studies show humans are losing the ability for "Spoken" langauge. An associate professor at the university of craven had this to say, "Our research shows that humans have been attempting to do this through the excessive use of beverages for thousands of years. Only recently has the human population discovered the "internet". This internet seems to be the cause for the slow degeneration of spoken language." Another professor from the college of fine arts and crafts had this to say, "Wait minute, got message icq".

  • Unfortunately ... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Daniel Dvorkin ( 106857 ) on Sunday January 05, 2003 @09:48PM (#5022940) Homepage Journal
    From the article:
    "The linguists then came up with a definition that emphasised syntax much more than symbols," says de Waal. "Sometimes we feel it's a bit unfair that they move the goal posts as soon as we get near."
    This is a real problem, which affects other areas of research as well, e.g. AI. There is a pseudo-religious, notably unscientific meme that basically says, "These are the things that make us human, so any time anyone shows us something else (an animal, a machine) that can do these things, we'll change the definition of 'these things.'" It's been abundantly obvious for some time that several species of smart animals have language, not only for communicating with humans but with each other -- e.g., different orca pods speak mutually incomprehensible dialects -- but there's such resistance to the idea that dedicated researchers have a hard time getting their results taken seriously. I can't think of any other area of science that's as vulnerable to ideology as research into the nature of intelligence.

    (And no, evolutionary biology doesn't count, because the creationists are operating outside the scientific community, not within it -- however much the "intelligent design" people might like to believe otherwise.)

    • Re:Unfortunately ... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Jerf ( 17166 )
      This is a real problem, which affects other areas of research as well, e.g. AI.There is a pseudo-religious, notably unscientific meme that basically says,...

      While I won't deny that is part of it, that is not the whole story, especially when it comes to AI. There is also "Well, hmmm, we did that and it wasn't half as good as we thought it would be. That's not truly thought."

      Same for animals; the fact is these "researchers" won't ever win because we are what we are, and we are the only ones we are. No matter how many parlor tricks a chimp or ape may learn, they still aren't as good as humans, or they would effectively be humans. Same for dolphins and everything else.

      The primate researchers need to be realistic and realize they are never going to convince anybody that the other primates are just as smart as us, because they aren't. If they were there would be little or no debate. I assume that's the "bar" the person in the article was bitching about, because it's the only one I can think of and the only one they might get frustrated over.

      (It's worth pointing out that at least part of the reason dolphins will never outsmart us anytime soon without our help is their bodies. Bodies are intricately tied to intelligence; without the ability to manipulate their environment easily in significant ways, plus being in a technilogically hostile environment, an ocean-born dolphin could have twice our brainpower in some theoretical sense and still not stand a chance in any practical intelligence test. Change their bodies without changing their brains significantly, to the extent that makes sense biologically (it's not like there are "brain" genes per se), and the matters may change a bit. Brains aren't enough. The other primates face disadvantages in this arena too, though they are not as pronounced. There's a bit of a catch-22; the brainpower (mostly through a larger head, apparently) to use the enhanced body need to develop roughly at the same time. Neither are necessarily useful on their own; an input-starved brain will turn its neurons to other tasks, where, say, an opposable thumb without a brain to effectively use it is also useless. This is somewhat simplified.)

      • Re:Unfortunately ... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Scaba ( 183684 ) <<joe> <at> <joefrancia.com>> on Monday January 06, 2003 @12:59AM (#5023669)

        Your 19th century thinking intrigues me. You're just kidding and/or trolling, right?

        I'm reminded of a quote from the great Douglas Adams:

        It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much -- the wheel, New York, wars and so on -- whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man -- for precisely the same reasons.
      • The point is humans are not the only game in town. As far as better, I'll take a chimp or a dolphin over half of the people on this planet any day. It's not a question of will they be "equal" or "better", but rather than assuming that it's just a dumb animal (organic automation), and is repeatedly being proven that animals can think, learn, problem solve, count, have emotions, have language, play, and intentially kill over territory, group, race and species. To lift a quote from an animal research program (Love discovery/animal planet/history channel) "It's becoming apparent that intelligence whether animal or human is a question of degree rather than type." . Hope I didn't butcher that to badly. The above commenter seems to hold onto the human arrogance that we are the only ones that can do what we do. They also miss the fact that that the "Bar" does get moved, as it always has in the past, when ever something new comes along that might contradict long held beliefs in science, religion, or social norms.
    • Regardless of what you say about this, I think it's quite strange how you never seem to get linguists saying that animals have a language ability equivalent to humans. Syntax is one of the most surprising and powerful things about human language, and something animals just haven't ever been shown to develop to any comparable degree.

    • Re:Unfortunately ... (Score:2, Insightful)

      by PEdelman ( 200362 )

      The debate over animal language is very heated, but it intrigues me that researchers on both sides of the "camps" almost always start flaming without definig what language is. I actually get the impression that they all more or less are saying the same, the men-is-only-capable-of-language camp saying that some animals are capable of some form of language but not to the extent of humans and the some-animals-use-language camp saying that, well, some animals are capable of some form of language but not to the extent of humans. The only thing is that the one group defines language as "language as used by humans" and the second group as "communicating by means of symbols".

      Just my 0.02 euro.

    • The problem is, to be generous, one of perspective. In my more judgmental moods, I say that we humans are arrogant. The natural world is incredibly complex, and animal behavior is definitely at the pinnacle of complexity. Animals and plants (I can't say re: fungi) at all levels of perceived development have been shown to communicate with each other. They may do this via vocalizations or scent, but they do it nonetheless. Vocalizations are not proof of intelligence, it's just that from our myopic perspective, we find it comfortable to judge the rest of the world from the throne we have built for ourselves. My current view is that the more we attempt to explain our superiority, the more we reveal that we are just one among many of the complex and as yet unexplainable creatures on this planet. I am thankful for the ongoing research, and hope it never stops; but let's keep in mind that the discovery of a shared characteristic between ourselves and another creature does not elevate the creature. He is what he is, and the same can be said for us. And perhaps (gasp) he is superior to us, in ways we are simply too self-absorbed to percieve. We are ever students. There are no experts.
    • It's been abundantly obvious for some time that several species of smart animals have language...
      Abundantly obvious to whom? I have a BA in Anthropology, from Boston University, and my advisor was Professor Terrence Deacon [bu.edu], author of "The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain [amazon.com]"; I can tell you that the topic is nowhere near as clear-cut as you describe, and most scientists come down on the other side of the cut from you.

      It's important to remember that communication != "language". Also, words != "language". They're important steps, but they're not the whole thing, which is what we have to keep in mind. Lions communicate with each other by roaring, but I don't think anyone would call that "language". Vervets have their famously different alarm calls, which have different meanings - "snake", or "eagle", or "leopard", etc., but even though they have meaning, they aren't held to be language because they have no meaning apart from their circumstances - a vervet can't use the snake call about a past snake, or a possible future snake, only about an existing and present one - and they have no syntax or grammar.

      These are things that every human language has - words and syntax - and no nonhuman "language" has been shown to have both of. You can have syntax without meaning: I could create an elaborate set of rules for arranging a series of colored pegs, for example, but unless the colors mean something, you wouldn't call it "language", because it doesn't convey anything in particular. I think that's probably where whalesong falls. Birdsong, too, can have rules to it, but I've yet to hear anyone say that birds have language. Whalesong can have internal structure, but unless it can be shown that it has meaning (and I don't understand how you can say that different dialects are mutually incomprehensible when we don't even know if they have a particular meaning), then it's not a language.

  • A well known US primate... (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    George Bush -

    Known Words:

    Oil, War, Terrorist and Money.
  • Great, Just wonderfull whats next?

    " You maniacs, you blew it up, ohhh, damn you, god, damn you all to hell........"

    Take yor stinking paws of me you dam dirty ape!

  • That's just great... (Score:4, Funny)

    by 3waygeek ( 58990 ) on Sunday January 05, 2003 @10:45PM (#5023165)
    now it's even harder to distinguish President Bush from a chimp [bushorchimp.com].
    • The bonobos who have earlier developed a simple vocabulary have rapidly evolved to include more complex vocabulary like warfore, compassionated, pillared, and vulcanize. Who knows that if this trend were to continue unabated, might they in the future be regarded not just as an equal to humans, but also be eligible to run for the highest office [whitehouse.gov]?
  • Obviously, people have different definitions for what a language is, but the one I've heard and use is not simply "is there a mapping between a sound and an object". That's true of many, many animals. I just yesterday was reading a National Geographic talking about meerkats having different warning sounds for humans and some other sort of predator (I forget what). The test is, instead, "can a *new concept* be expressed with the language". That requires a level of abstraction from simple noise-object mappings.
    • Abstract thought != Language

      I have a step sister who is deaf and brain damaged from birth. She can certainly speak a language, sign language. And yes, she is certainly human - she has feelings, and a personality.

      However, her capacity for abstract thought is limited. Just because she doesn't speak of the future beyond her next birthday party (which is always "next month") doesn't mean she doesn't have a language.

      And to make the trivial point - at some point the meerkats expressed a new concept - "human". It doesn't matter which arrived last, the humans or the meerkats or the language, there was time when there was no understanding of the sound for human, and now there is.
      • I mean expressing a new concept purely within the language -- not introducing a new thing and then creating a new mapping for that thing. Producing the concept of a human without ever having encountered a human.
  • While the subject line is kind of a joke, it's actually true.

    Contact with Humans outside of a Prey-Predator context has likely started the whole language thing.

    They are not that far off from us. We learn by observing, and SO DO THEY!

    We have culturally infected them so like in the Laurie Anderson [laurieanderson.com] song - Language is a Virus [sing365.com]

  • My sister's cat has cals for `cat food,' `Human food,' 'I need to use kitty litter,' and even let me out.

    My dog barks when she wants in, and wimpers as I greater her after a long absence.

  • He learned on his own! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ParticleGirl ( 197721 ) <SlashdotParticle ... Tom minus distro> on Monday January 06, 2003 @12:29AM (#5023588) Journal
    The most interesting thing about this is that the bonobo in question learned this stuff on his own. We've all heard about sign language, chimps pointing to symbols on keyboards or screens or whatever... all that stuff. The skeptics have always said, "ok, fine-- but you must intensively train animals to use even very rudimentary symbolic communication; you wouldn't be able to stop a human from learning all that and much, much more. How much can all this signing mean?" This bonobo was not intensively trained. He wasn't trained to speak at all. In fact, he wasn't taught any of this, to begin with.

    Human children soak up new languages like sponges. Adults are notoriously bad at learning new languages. Virtually all language research done on non-human primates to date has been intensively training adult animals to use abstract symbols (like ASL or glyphs or whatever) to make a one-to-one correspondence to an object or action.

    Kanzi grew up around humans, since his mother was being intensively trained to use a keyboard and he was too young to leave her side. He was not trained. He didn't even seem interested. Then, one day, Kanzi's mother was taken away-- and he began using everything she'd been taught (quite a bit more, in fact, than she ever learned) and very accurately. He learned because he was around that type of communication when he was young, and he just "picked it up."

    Now, that was when his mother was being specifically trained to use a keyboard. She wasn't being specifically trained to speak. So he picked up, on his own, that human speech has something to do with communication, and how it works, and is able to use words across contexts, and was never explicitly taught to do so. I'd call that pretty damn revealing about the inherent linguistic abilities of bonobos.

    Since they're our closest relatives, I'd say it's pretty revealing about the evolutionary history of our own linguistic abilities.
  • I once read that chimps have the intelligence of an average human three year old. Three year olds usually have a fairly (it's all relative) usable vocabulary. The reason I heard for why chimps can't speak is that they never developed a "speech center" in the brain. Is this really such a black-and-white thing? My cat has some sort of vocal expression happening, but isn't of course smart enough to use a complex language like English.

    Since chimps are supposedly smart enough to do this, how long will it be before there is an organism other than a human that can speak English (or any complex human language) and actually know what they're talking about? I think that would be pretty interesting, to talk to another species.


    • > I once read that chimps have the intelligence of an average human three year old. Three year olds usually have a fairly (it's all relative) usable vocabulary. The reason I heard for why chimps can't speak is that they never developed a "speech center" in the brain. Is this really such a black-and-white thing?

      No, it's not black-and-white at all.

      Human vocabulary is actually dispersed all over the cortex. (The purported speech center is purportedly dedicated to syntax processing.)

      But there are problems with the whole notion of a speech center. Yes, clearly Broca's area is heavily implicated in language processing, but you also get some truly bizarre effects where people have damage to other areas of the brain and lose extremely specific linguistic capabilities as a result.

      The way the brain supports language use is far from understood, however much certain parties would have you believe otherwise. And other primates have brains very like the human brain; IMO some rudimentary linguistic capabilities would be the default expectation.

      Also, notice that the other apes' tongue and throat do not have the structure/control that would ever let them pronounce as many different sounds as humans do. Lots of people argue that this means language developed only with anatomically modern humans -- even the Neandertals being somewhat deficient in this area. However, it has never been shown how many distinguishable sounds are necessary to support language, so this whole line of argument is built without any foundation.

      The root of the problem is that too many people view language as an all-or-nothing thingy that you either "have" or "don't have", with nothing intermediate between a full modern language and the grunts and cries of the other primates (which lots of people want to dismiss as non-linguistic behavior). But probably the most important scientific result of the past 40 years is the continuous sequence of revelations that the other apes, particularly the chimps, are more like us than we ever thought. They hunt. They use tools. They have cultures that pass their rudimentary technologies from generation to generation. They have rudimentary linguistic capabilities. It's time for certain linguists to give up the medieval notion that humans are a thing apart from the rest of our kin. Only then will we start to understand language.

      • Also, notice that the other apes' tongue and throat do not have the structure/control that would ever let them pronounce as many different sounds as humans do.

        I have been told that, in addition, humans are the only primates that possess "voluntary breathing", that is, primates cannot control their breathing at will (most animals don't, humans have this characteristic in common with aquatic animals, which is another story alltogether). For apes to control their breath by will is like for humans controlling their hart rate by will. So apes can use their breath for making single or rythmic cries and that kind of sounds, but words and sentences require a lot more effort.

        • My dog voluntarily holds his breath when we play fetch at the lake by my house.

          I would guess that the reason that primates don't display "voluntary breathing" is simply because they are being subject to "scary" laboratory conditions.

          I would imagine most people would not be able to exhibit "voluntary" breathing under similar conditions, ie your stereotypicial "alien abduction" scenario.

          I bet if they threw a banana in the bottom of 15 foot deep water tank in a room full of monkeys, eventually one of them would hold his breath long enough to get it.
        • It's not that uncommon among other mammals, either.. I know horses, for one, can hold their breath for a significant period to avoid a girth being tightened properly :)
    • Spoken language is not any more expressive than a sign langauge. If the chimps had all intellectual capabilities of a three year old, I would expect them to perform as well as a three year communicating a thought with a sign language.

      That doesn't happen. Their overall language development resembles that of humans', just faster and ending sooner. Chimps start *much* faster than human babies at picking up words and rech two-word stage earlier. But sometime well before their first birthday, they stall. They never get past two word stage, which is when babies say stuff like "papa nice", "sour apple" and when "sour apple" is synonymous with "apple sour."

      Since stall occurs so early in the development, it is unclear whether it is really faster human development that stalls earlier or just an ability to learn arbitrary mappings between things and symbols and have little (perhaps nothing) else in common with human language use and acqusition. I, as should be evident by now, think it is the same process with a more limited cognitive capability. Other do claim otherwise. None of the groups have conclusive evidence either way.

      So my take on your question is chimps are not smart enough to do that and the answer is never. If they were capable, they would be speaking and we would have known the answer as "now."

      OTOH, if there are really language centers, genes etc. that are solely responsible for language, independent from general intelligence level and cognitive capabilities, then it should be possible to bred a transgenetic monkey you can speak to. That would also be highly unethical, so probably noone would ever bred one. And the answer is, once again, never.

  • is this the next generation of managers?

    knows only a few buzz words, but has no idea of what the project is all about ;-)
  • I don't find this to be that interesting really. My dog tries to mimic my syllables. He makes distinctive growls for when he wants to go out, when he's hungry, and when he just wants attention. I don't find this to be that great of a feat. Chimps are able to learn sign language, so why are we surprised that they can learn words? Am I just missing the point here??
    • Yeah, my dog even makes different barking sounds based on how close someone is to the house, how many people are approaching, etc.

      This is nothing new, people have researched wolves in the wild (i.e. No human intervention, like Mr. Ape) and they exhibit similar communication abilities.
  • Show me a chimp that can "say" four words....

    And I'll show you the next /. editor.

    (Come on, I can't have been the only one to come up with this one, right?)
  • "Oh oh ah ah oh oh ah oh aaah aaah oooh aaah ooh uu uu aa oo ah ah oh oh"

    *Click!* Damned telemarketers!
  • Pick up a couple books from Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct and Words and Rules. That's the real cutting edge of linguistics.

    In a nutshell, chimps / primates / dolphins / etc. always come up short in some ways from anything you could call language. Just off the top of my head, using a finite set of words (English has ~ 500,000), we can come up with an infinite number of things to say. That's many, many orders of magnitude more complex. Throw in pronouns (and the implied ability to think of others as individual entities), verbs, adjectives, adverbs, tenses, affixes, etc. and the differences magnify.

    Also, think of the physical differences. We have the pretty-much-unique ability in the animal kingdom to choke because of combined air/food passage in our throat (needed for speech). And the face control ... and the tongue control. Even the deaf use the same areas of their brain while signing that the hearing world does for speech.

    But it goes deeper than that. Humans have a tough time seeing language as something unique and special; and yet, we love giraffes for their giant necks; elephants for their trunks; bumblebees for their whacky ability to fly. We revel in what makes them unique ... why can't we revel in what makes us unique? Comparing a chimp's ability to speak to our own is like comparing a crow's squawking to Mozart. Both involve sound, but one is music and the other isn't.

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