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TOWARD GRANTING LINGUISTIC COMPETENCE TO APES: A REVIEW OF SAVAGE‐RUMBAUGH ET AL.‘S LANGUAGE COMPREHENSION IN APE AND CHILD 1
Author(s) -
Sundberg Mark L.
Publication year - 1996
Publication title -
journal of the experimental analysis of behavior
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.75
H-Index - 61
eISSN - 1938-3711
pISSN - 0022-5002
DOI - 10.1901/jeab.1996.65-477
Subject(s) - repertoire , psychology , comprehension , reinforcement , bonobo , competence (human resources) , cognitive psychology , linguistics , cognitive science , social psychology , developmental psychology , ecology , philosophy , physics , acoustics , biology
Savage‐Rumbaugh et al.'s (1993) monograph describes a study that compared the language comprehension of an 8‐year‐old ape (a bonobo named Kanzi) with that of a normal 2‐year‐old human (Alia). The primary purpose of the research was to see if Kanzi could comprehend novel and compound spoken English commands without imitative prompts, contrived reinforcement contingencies, or explicit training procedures. As it turned out, Kanzi acquired a complex comprehension repertoire in a pattern similar to the human child's and even performed better than the human child in many cases. Although this review describes these empirical results favorably, it questions the authors' claim that the subjects learned the repertoire on their own, without reinforcement or training. A close examination of the subjects' histories and of the procedures, transcripts, and videos suggested that the training and testing procedures involved a number of independent variables and processes that were not discussed by the authors, including conditioned reinforcement and punishment, verbal prompts, stimulus control, establishing operations, and extinction. Nonetheless, the methodological and empirical contributions to ape and human language research are substantial and deserve behavior analysts' attention and support. Behavior analysts could contribute to this kind of research by applying the analytic and conceptual tools of behavior analysis in general and the concepts from Verbal Behavior (Skinner, 1957) in particular.