: It can be done--but you have to remove the external and
: physical advantages which a human child has over an
: ape. Human children have dozens of older humans
: nearby, constantly talking around them, talking to
: them. Ape subjects generally have one or two
: researchers who come in and try to teach them language
: for a set period each day; other human contacts are
: fleeting and distant Human children also (naturally)
: have the physical tools to master the languages around
: them; apes don't have the proper mouths or throats to
: do so. The languages they seem best equipped to learn
: so far are based on hand signs; but these are not
: commonly used among the bulk of humanity.
having a mouth is not a prerequiste for a language, nor is a throat. deaf and mute children acquire languages as well as hearing and speaking children.
: So knock a human child down to a lab ape's level--make
: him a neglected, isolated, congenitally mute orphan to
: whom virtually no one speaks directly save for his
: pair of ASL-trained social workers--and see how well
: he does at languages. That's the classic recipe for
: developmental disability.
well, it's ridiculous to think a child would learn a language without hearing any language at all. but children have learned a natural language with remarkably meager input. just because most children happen to learn their first natural language in an environment rich with language data does not mean that children require such an environment to learn a language. this is why i use words like 'thirsty' to describe a child's behavior in learning a language. whereas languages have to be almost forcefed to even the smartest of apes, even the dullest of human children with meager attention cannot help but learn a language. and this is really amazing when you stop to think about it.
in fact, children can learn a language that's not even there. one of the most fascinating things children do with language is create new ones--making a creole from a pidgin. a pidgin language is not really a language. it's a bunch of words and phrases that convey meaning, but it lacks the underlying structure of a generative grammar. a pidgin is formed when groups of adults that don't share a language are brought together and need to communicate. The pidgin usually ends up containing significant elements of both or all the parent languages. what's fascinating is how the children growing up hearing pidgin spoken then turn the pidgin into a new language, called a creole. the children hypothesize underlying rules that do not, until that point, exist. and the children do not select a leader to pick what the rules are. it is something that is done in a group somehow. really what's going on is that our brains are built to look for language and a certain kind of language at that. the pidgin spoken by the parents actually described a certain creole, and the children showed them what it was.
: Conversely, raise an ape among a large, friendly group of
: people--or other apes--trained in the use of a
: language with which the ape is physically compatible,
: and how might he do? Well, we don't know yet, of
: course. We might get a chance to find out on Maui
: soon, though.
clearly this would be something to be discovered and not ruled out a priori, but i suggest it would be extremely surprising if an ape learned a language in such an environment, simply because i've never heard of evidence that ape brains look for language the way that human brains do. at the same time, i'm sure ape brains 'train up' to their environments in myriad ways that human brains would fail spectacularly at.
: I agree that humans are probably naturally better at
: communication than other apes, certainly, but I think
: the gap is potentially pretty narrow.
i don't know that i would even want to say this. what counts as success with communication? an ape may not be able to convey as subtle or complex a theoretical point as you or i, but it doesn't need to. from what i've seen of jane goodall's work, apes manage to convey a great deal of emotion and intention without language at all.
the 'languages' used in ape-human communication are probably very close to pidgins, i would imagine. and if you added human children to the mix, giving the same stimuli to both the apes and the human children, i think you'd find that the human children ended up with a different language than would the apes. this doesn't mean that apes aren't smart. it just means that ape brains don't look for human languages the way that human brains do. or at least that's the best we know today. this could turn out to be false, like any other particular belief in our great web, but current evidence militates against it.
i just don't think we should only say apes are smart if they have the capacity for language. human language is not a universal indicator of smartness. it's just one of many adaptations our species has acquired. there's no reason to expect apes to have it, or to think less of them if they'd don't. what's more, language use doesn't even count as an indicator of smartness among humans, because just about everybody that's not brain damaged acquires a language. it's not a challenging task that some succeed at and some fail at.
