It is interesting that we, as humans, often think of ourselves as the only species that has developed the ability to communicate. There are thought to be different types of communication employed by many different species, but we do cannot understand them, just as we cannot understand other languages that we have not learnt first. Some biologists have attempted to understand the communication of other species, but what’s most interesting to psychologists is the potential that we could understand other species enough that we could communicate with them ourselves. Since chimpanzees are perhaps the most similar species to us, most of the work in the area is based around them.
It has been shown, by researchers such as Gardner and Gardner, that associative symbol learning can be acquired by chimpanzees, whereby they come to associate symbols with specific objects, and can also learn how to request objects when systematically taught. This makes sense considering the behaviourist ideas of operant conditioning, where behaviours that are rewarded are more likely to be repeated, but this simple style of learning can be repeated in most animals, such as cats or dogs. Savage-Rumbaugh suggested that this, associative learning style, is not really communication, since it relies on contextual clues to the language. Only language that occurs without clues, known as representational learning, can be considered proper language use, since it requires an actual knowledge of what the symbols represent. It should be noted that other apes do not have the same vocal equipment as humans, so this rules out the ability for actual speech, so instead symbols are used to test the ability to successfully communicate.
Savage-Rumbaugh believed that all chimps perhaps did not have the mental ability to learn to communicate with us, but suggested that a specific variety, known as Bonobo Chimpanzees, may do, and so carried out a study to see if they held more potential for learning to use symbols to communicate. The reason for this belief was that in the wild, these chimps are naturally more social and so perhaps were more mentally prepared for learning language use.
Two Bonobos called Kanzi and Mulika were exposed to a lexigram system, with symbols to represent words. These were on a keyboard, with buttons that would light up when pressed and a speech synthesizer would read out the words. Kanzi started to show an interest in the symbols aged about one and a half and as he grew he developed the ability to spontaneously use lexigrams to request things such as playing a chase game.
Sherman and Austin, two normal chimpanzees were also able to use the lexigram system, but did not acquire it spontaneously as the two Bonobos did. They had to be trained to use the tool, and this is thought to suggest they had a lower capacity for understanding than the bonobos did. Kanzi, by the end of the experiment, after about 4 years, had learnt to use 46 words spontaneously and correctly, and each of these words was tested against criteria to make sure that they properly understood it.
With studies like this, it may be possible that one day we are able to communicate very easily with members of other species, and Bonobos currently look like the most suitable candidates, yet with less funding going into these sorts of studies, since they aren’t very applicable to our own, human, society, they could soon be forgotten and interest from society lost. Even so, we can take pleasure in the knowledge that animals may not be as simple and predictable as once was thought.
Image from: https://unitedcats.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/kanzi.jpg
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