Gao, Peng
1K121006
Interdisciplinary Studies 1
Reflection Essay for Week 7
Reflection Essay for Can Apes Learn Languages?
What are the differences between animals and humankinds? For more than a
century anthropologists have generally assumed that humankind's ability to make
tools and use language is the most important characteristic to distinguish us from
other animals (savageãRumbaugh, 1999). The critical thinking is here; in the 1950s
psychologists B. F Skinner argued that human children learn natural language through
conditioning. Hence, in another words, if the animals have the same training with
human babies, the animals can learn exactly the same language as humans. However,
in the 1960s linguist Noam Chomsky disproved Skinner's theory, showing that
human language is so highly complex that it must require some innate biological
capability, which he called a "language acquisition device." (savageãRumbaugh,
1999).
As the scientists' experiments stated, if we put the same age an ape baby and a
human baby together which have the equal situation. Ape can understand more words
than human after several months. However, human baby can get more knowledge
than ape in nine months. No matter how long we train ape, it is still impossible to let
them say a sentence in "humankind languages" (Wallman, 1992). The most
significant thing, which we can't just summarize the reasons why apes can't speak is
that their biological device is not suitable for pronouncing human words. As recently
experiments state, after the training apes, they can learn almost one hundred body
languages. Hence, the body languages of apes can no longer compare with
humankind's languages. They can't distinguish initiative and passive sentences, past
tense and present tense, and engagement. Though apes have body language, but there
is a very important difference between them.
As last assignment stated, bees can do a very complex...