A Basic Course in Anthropological Linguistics (Studies in Linguistic ...

42 A BASIC COURSE IN ANTHROPOLOGICAL LINGUISTICS
Language (ASL) as the code for imparting human language to them. One of
the first subjects was a female chimpanzee named Washoe, whose training by
the Gardner husband and wife team (Gardner and Gardner 1969,1975) began
in 1966 when she was almost one year of age. Remarkably, Washoe learned to
use 132 ASL signs in just over four years. What is even more remarkable is the
fact that Washoe learned to put signs together to express a small set of syntactic
relations.
The Premack husband and wife team (Premack and Premack 1983), whose
work with a five-year-old chimpanzee named Sarah began in 1954, used a
different method. They taught their subject a form of written language, training
Sarah to arrange and respond to vertical sequences of plastic tokens on a
magnetic board, which represented individual words: e.g., a small pink square
= “banana”; a small blue triangle = “apple”; and so on. Sarah eventually developed
the ability to respond to combinations of such symbols, which included
references to abstract notions.
Although there is much enthusiasm over such results, with the media
reporting on them on a regular basis, there really has emerged no solid evidence
to suggest that chimpanzees and gorillas are capable of language in the same
way that humans are, nor of having the ability or desire to pass on to their
offspring what they have learned from their human mentors. Aware of the
importance of such experiments, in 1960 the linguist Charles Hockett proposed
a typology of 13 design features that he suggested would allow the researchers
to establish what true language behavior was:
Design Feature Properties and Manifestations in
Language
1. Auditory-vocal vocal language and communication involves
mainly mouth and ear work, as opposed to
visual, tactile, or other modes of
communication.
2. Broadcast a verbal signal can be heard by any auditory
transmission system within ear range, and by which the
and directional source can be located using the ears’
reception direction-finding capacity.
3. Rapid fading auditory signals are transitory and do not
await the hearer’s convenience.