Linguistics Encyclopedia.pdf

A-Z 17
least in the field of animal ethics. For if there is only a difference in degree and not in
kind between humans and the higher primates, it becomes even more difficult than it
would otherwise be to argue that humans have a right to use higher primates for their own
purposes. Furthermore, it is hard to say when a difference in degree becomes a difference
in kind, so, progressing down the scale of living creatures (if the very notion of ‘scale’
makes sense in this context), what rights have humans over any creature?
I shall go no further into these difficult moral problems; however, it has sometimes
been thought that the mark of difference in kind rather than degree is the ability of an
animal to learn to use human language, and there is a fairly long tradition of attempting to
teach human language to higher primates, in particular to chimpanzees. Most of these
studies have involved chimpanzees reared in a human home or human-home-like
environment, since it is in such an environment that most humans learn to speak. One
early study, however, involved not a home-reared chimpanzee, but a performing one
(Witmer, 1909; see Fouts and Rigby, 1977).
The chimpanzee in question, Peter, was employed in Philadelphia’s Keith Theatre.
The psychologist Witmer met Peter when the latter was between four and six years old;
Peter had received two and a half years of training for his theatrical work at this time.
Witmer took Peter for intelligence tests at the Psychological Clinic in Philadelphia. It
turned out that Peter could carry out simple reasoning tasks quite easily— unlocking
doors, opening boxes, and hammering nails in. He did not display any particular aptitude
for writing. He could say mama, although unwillingly and with difficulty, having severe
problems with vowels. However, it took him only a few minutes to learn to say /p/, and
Witmer comments:
If a child without language were brought to me and on the first trial had
learned to articulate the sound ‘p’ as readily as Peter did, I should express
the opinion that he could be taught most of the elements of articulate
language within six months’ time.
Witmer also noticed that although Peter could not speak, he understood words, and he
thought that Peter would probably be able to learn to associate symbols with objects;
several later experiments have confirmed that chimpanzees can indeed learn this
associative connection, and one of these will be described below. Early on, however, the
focus was on teaching chimpanzees to speak. Three more or less unsuccessful attempts at
this involved the chimpanzees Joni, Gua, and Viki.
Joni was raised and observed by N.Kohts and her family between 1913 and 1916,
when he was between one and a half and four years old. The study was not published
until 1935, because Kohts was saving her notes on Joni for comparison with notes on the
behaviour of her own child, Roody, between 1925 and 1929 when he was of the same age
as Joni had been during the study involving him. Kohts did not specifically train Joni to
speak, because she wanted to see if he would do so as relatively spontaneously as a
human child does; but the only sounds he produced were those which young chimpanzees
normally produce, from which Kohts concluded that his intellectual capacities were
different in kind from those of humans.
Gua was a month-old chimpanzee adopted by W. and L.Kellogg, who had a son,
Donald, of the same age as Gua. Gua and Donald lived in the same surroundings and