Duane M. Rumbaugh

Where do We Stand and Where Are We Going

Most of the scientific work on animal language has been crammed into the last 35 years. Others will be able to make a better assessment of this work after another 35 years have passed. Nevertheless, we are confident about some conclusions.

A Chronology of Events in Animal Language Research

You may wish to skim this chronology to get a rapid overview of how research on trying to teach animals a human language has progressed. Interest in animal language is ancient, but its scientific study is strikingly modern.

Signs in Oklahoma and Ellensburg

When Roger and Deborah Fouts were married in 1964 they could not have known about the journey they were about to undertake. They were students at Long Beach State, and both of them wanted to work with children. However, 2 years later Roger found himself being interviewed by Allen Gardner at the University of Nevada in Reno, as a potential research assistant to work with the young Washoe while Roger pursued his Ph.D. in psychology.1 Roger was sure that the interview had been a disaster and that he had no chance to get the assistantship he had to have to survive—until Allen took him, as a kind of consolation prize, to see Washoe. She leapt into Roger’s arms and gave him a giant hug, something that Roger never again saw her do with a stranger. Washoe had hired Roger! More than 35 years later, she still has not fired him. That central fact has directed the Foutses’ lives.

Chimpanzees can Write with Plastic Symbols

The Premacks, Ann James and David, were interested in animal cognition and language very early, at least as early as 1954 (personal communication, David Premack, 1954) and started preparatory work with monkeys soon after that time. In 1964,1 the Premacks adopted two young female chimpanzees named Sarah and Gussie. Sarah proved to be an excellent student, but Gussie never learned a single word. The Premacks later worked on language training with several other animals, but none of them were as intelligent as Sarah. A characteristic of the Premacks’ work is that their primary interest was in the cognition of chimpanzees, with language regarded more as a window to the chimpanzee mind than as the center of their attention. David Premack’s discussion2 of the. relative problem-solving abilities of language-trained and non-language-trained chimpanzees makes that clear. He found striking individual differences in intelligence between chimpanzees in each group, whether language-trained or not: “We have...had both gifted and ungifted animals in each group. Sarah is a bright animal by any standards, but so is Jessie, one of the non-language-trained animals. The groups are also comparable at the other end of the continuum, Peony’s negative gifts being well matched by those of Luvy” (p. 125).

A Cultural Approach to Language Learning

The Language Research Center (LRC) where Drs. Duane Rumbaugh and Sue Savage-Rumbaugh work is a scatter of buildings on 50 acres of gorgeous Georgia pines within the boundaries of Decatur, Georgia. Decatur is a suburb of, and continuous with, the great southern city of Atlanta. Within these buildings are dispersed several chimpanzees, at least seven bonobos (formerly called pygmy chimpanzees) and several rhesus macaques. Up a rocky, sometimes muddy, road along the borders of this Georgia State University property is a wooden house that seems virtually to grow out of the trees that surround it. You always need a high clearance vehicle to get there, and when it rains you had better have a 4-wheel drive. Sue lives there, and Nyota, a 4-year-old bonobo, has been living there with Sue almost as often as with his bonobo mother, Panbanisha.

Evaluations of the Ape Language Research

Some criticisms have been applied to most, if not all, of the ape language research. Others apply only to one of the methods of circumventing the vocal channel or to a specific research project.

An Overview of Animal Language

On a recent day in Decatur, Georgia, the following conversation took place: n n nPanbanisha: Milk, sugar. n n nLiz: No, Panbanisha, I’d get in a lot of trouble if I gave you milk with sugar. n n nPanbanisha: Give milk, sugar. n n nLiz: No, Panbanisha, I’d get in a lot of trouble. n n nPanbanisha: Want milk, sugar. n n nLiz: No, Panbanisha, I’d get in so much trouble. Here’s some milk. n n nPanbanisha: Milk, sugar. Secret.

Koko Fine Sign Gorilla

On November 19, 2000, I visited Koko, her male consort Ndume, and her people, Drs. Francine (Penny) Patterson and Ronald (Ron) Cohn. The way to their place leads off highway 280 north of Palo Alto, California, through the small town of Woodside. From there the road winds tortuously up into the Santa Cruz Mountains, nearly, I judged, to the highest point that can be reached by road. As I climbed higher and higher I was thinking, “This may be an appropriate place for mountain gorillas, but Koko and her male consort Ndume, are lowland gorillas—and this certainly isn’t lowland!”

Language Studies with Bottlenosed Dolphins

Louis Herman conducts his dolphin research in tanks located at the Kewalo Basin Marine Mammal Laboratory in Honolulu, Hawaii. Visitors ascend stairs into a tower above two seawater tanks, one situated to the north and another to the south of the structure. The tanks are circular, 50 feet in diameter. The tanks are connected by a ten-foot-wide channel. Dolphins occupy both tanks.

Washoe, the First Signing Chimpanzee

It was June 21, 1966. Allen and Beatrix (“Trixie”) Gardner welcomed a chimpanzee named Kathy to Reno, Nevada. They renamed their wild-caught infant chimpanzee Washoe after the county in which Reno is located. In an ironic touch, the Gardners and Roger Fouts later discovered that Washoe, in the language of the Washoe Indians who were the county’s original inhabitants, meant “people,”1 in the sense of “the people,” or the special people of the region. Washoe was, the Gardners estimated, about 10 months old, and they intended to teach her a simple version of American Sign Language (ASL).