17.67, Review: Animal Communication: Segerdahl et al. (2005)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-17-67. Wed Jan 11 2006. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 17.67, Review: Animal Communication: Segerdahl et al. (2005)

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What follows is a review or discussion note contributed to our 
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1)
Date: 10-Jan-2006
From: Anne Reboul < reboul at isc.cnrs.fr >
Subject: Kanzi's Primal Language 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Wed, 11 Jan 2006 17:31:47
From: Anne Reboul < reboul at isc.cnrs.fr >
Subject: Kanzi's Primal Language 
 

AUTHORS: Segerdahl, Pär; Fields, William; Savage-Rumbaugh, Sue
TITLE: Kanzi's Primal Language
SUBTITLE: The Cultural Initiation of Primates into Language
PUBLISHER: Palgrave Macmillan
YEAR: 2005
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-2798.html 

Anne Reboul, Research Team ''Linguistics, Pragmatics and 
Cognition'', Institute for Cognitive Sciences, CNRS, France

SUMMARY OF THE BOOK

The book is made of four chapters, a summary of the design features 
(of language) and appendixes. 

The first chapter bears a narrative title: 'How Kanzi acquires language 
in a forest in Georgia' and opens with an introduction on 'Culture in 
animals'. Japanese primatologists were the first to endow animals, 
notably great apes and more specifically chimpanzees with culture, 
making it ''one of our 'natural' possession -- one that humans share 
with many other animal species'' (2). The main ideas of the authors 
center around a major difference between first- and second-language 
acquisition as well as around the notion of a shared culture between 
bonobos and their human caretakers, the so-called 'Pan/Homo 
culture', with an emphasis on the 'spontaneity' of both the culture and 
the language. A specificity of the LRC (Language Research Center, 
Atlanta) lies in not trying to teach language to apes based on a 
specific view of language. Rather ''Kanzi acquired language similarly 
as human children do: spontaneously and without training'' (3), 
understanding English far in excess of what he could express on the 
keyboard of lexigrams. This led Savage-Rumbaugh and her 
colleagues to three features of language acquisition: spontaneity, 
precedence of comprehension over production and importance of 
early exposition. A new view now developed in LRC is that ''first-
language acquisition occurs as an aspect of (...) 'enculturation''' (7). It 
leads to a primal language, a ''cultural matrix'', which in turn may allow 
the acquisition of a second language. Thus, ''what is acquired in 
childhood (...) is fundamentally different from a specific language'' (7). 
On this view, culture can be defined both as non-genetically 
transmitted information and as a content leading to a shared way of 
living. A major hypothesis is that ''by describing the cultural dimension 
of language, it becomes possible to hypothesize a gene-culture 
evolution of human language'' (9) though language acquisition by 
bonobos suggests that it is a cultural arrangement of traits selected 
for other functions. On this view, language is an undetachable part of 
culture (conceived as a way of life) and cannot be studied apart from 
a shared culture. 

The authors then turn to the previously published experimental study 
of Kanzi's understanding of English (see Savage-Rumbaugh et al., 
1993).These were carefully planned to show that Kanzi 
understood ''human language in the formal sense demanded by many 
linguists'' (15).They then turn to a comparison of the way Kanzi 
acquired language and the way Nim (Terrace's chimpanzee) was 
taught it, Kanzi through living in a rich shared cultural environment, 
Nim in a bare classroom. In other words, Kanzi acquired language as 
human children acquire their first language, while Nim was taught 
language as children are taught a second language. The dimensions 
of first language acquisition are cultural in the above sense, which is 
not the case for second language acquisition. In other words, ''*our 
primal language is an intrinsic aspect of culture. First-language 
acquisition is enculturation*'' (22, authors' emphasis). And, ''*our primal 
language is the cultural matrix of specific languages*'' (25, idem). 

The second chapter is devoted to the ''Design features of language''. It 
begins with the quest for precursors of language in ape interaction, for 
which the authors enumerate: cooperative hunting, cultural 
transmission of tool use, empathy and reconciliation, manipulating the 
behavior of conspecifics. They then turn to the well-known catalogue 
of design features of language proposed by Charles Hockett in 1963). 
It is criticized as being too grammar-based and the authors propose to 
replace it with a culture-based catalogue, insisting that their aim is 
conceptual clarification: based on how Kanzi acquired language, we 
can more realistically assess what language is and its significance in 
biology than through context-independent research. This leads to the 
following list of design features: spontaneity (as evidenced in how 
Kanzi acquired language); boundlessness (no demarcation between 
language and life: life changes with language acquisition through 
enculturation, conceived as a biologically grounded process); 
immanence (life is permeated with language and language acquisition 
changed Kanzi's body and his mind); cultural creativity and generality 
(''linguistic creativity is a variant of the creativity of the primate way of 
life'' (45) and the distinction between language and language use -- or 
semantics and pragmatics -- should be abandoned); placement 
(replacing Hockett's feature of displacement: ''*linguistic 
communications, even about things remote in space and time, are 
placed in, or belong to, cultural activities acquired with the primal 
language*'' (55, authors' emphasis)); gestures and tools (gestures are 
central to language as they manifest what the speaker (e.g. Kanzi) 
means: ''language is to a great extent a visible phenomenon: an 
aspect of our enculturated body'' (62)); culture-sustained vocal 
speech and other media (Kanzi vocalize in an English-like way and his 
human carers understand his vocalizations through their common 
Pan/Homo culture); cultural unity (language is grounded in an 
interpersonally shared culture); non-arbitrariness (though signs may 
be arbitrary, their uses are not and hence neither is primal language); 
reflexivity (the only feature common with Hockett's catalogue: 
manifested in bonobos through checking that communication went 
through); flexible interface of primate interactions (allows for apes' 
acquiring language through commonalities of primate interaction, 
including human interaction); moral and personal dimensions (''there is 
no such thing as a neutral observer of the apes' language'' (90)).

The third chapter bears the intriguing title of ''Ambiguous human 
culture''. It deals with the revolution that the Kanzi experiment (his 
spontaneously acquiring language) wreaks on his human entourage 
conceptualization of language and should, according to the authors, 
change the general view about language which language research 
blindly assumes, replacing it by the catalogue of design features given 
in the previous chapter. They defend Pan/Homo culture against such 
strictures as de Waal's when he defends the notion of culture in 
nature, by claiming that ''what apes acquire by being raised in human 
culture is not alien to what they are as primates'' (104). In other words, 
the specific Pan/Homo culture which developed around Kanzi could do 
so because both bonobos and humans are apes, i.e. sensitive to 
culture. They turn to another criticism, i.e. that ape language research 
is anthropocentric. This, though true to some extent, is not true of 
what happened at LRC because language acquisition proceeded 
spontaneously there. Thus the LRC results can only be criticized as 
anthropocentric if one clings to a view of language which ignores its 
cultural aspects. Hence scepticism regarding Kanzi's language (as 
happens for instance with some of his caregivers) is an illustration of 
that myopic attitude towards language; linguists, by developing a 
professional culture, get insensitive and clumsy toward natural 
manifestations of language. This is not only true of linguists but of 
scientists in general who end up putting more emphasis on formal 
aspects of experimental design than on the content of the test. This, 
according to the authors, hints at what Wittgenstein 
called ''experimental methods and *conceptual confusion*'' (quoted by 
the authors, 123, authors' emphasis). This was, for instance, true, 
regarding Tomasello's insistence on a scientific test of imitation in 
bonobos, when he had just seen a natural instance of it. 

Though Tomasello acknowledged imitation of bonobos after their 
success at such a test, he still insists on ''a uniquely human motivation 
to share intentions'' (127), thus giving rise to a ratchet effect in cultural 
innovation. If Tomasello were right, then ''Kanzi as we know him is 
impossible or at least he cannot imitate'' (127). Tomasello's account of 
Kanzi's abilities is through human teaching, making Kanzi a parasite 
on human culture. In other words, Tomasello errs by ignoring the 
shared Pan/Homo culture. Thus, ''tests and statistics are important, 
but they cannot replace coming to know Kanzi and experiencing what 
it means to talk with him'' (138). This specific interpersonal experience 
is irreplaceable. The ambiguity of human culture is thus the ambiguity 
of the human culture as lived on an everyday basis and of the human 
culture as a specific instance of a scientific culture, in this specific 
instance, linguists' culture. There, we should take the Socratic stance: 
not bow to the superior knowledge embodied by scientific cultures, but 
just acknowledge that the only thing we can know with any certainty is 
our universal ignorance, apart from our lives as we live them. His 
scientific culture was what blinded Herbert Terrace to whatever 
language he had been able to teach Nim despite the obvious 
shortcomings in his pedagogic approach. 

Chapter 4 is devoted to 'What does it mean to study language?', a 
question approached via an agonist comparison with Chomsky's view 
of language. The first reproach the authors address to Chomsky is his 
neglect and indeed immediate rejection of common-sense usage as a 
way of addressing language-related questions. Indeed the 
Chomskyan choice of I-language (the inner, biologically based system) 
as an object of scientific inquiry suggests to the authors the restriction 
of language to an intellectually introvert mechanism, detached from its 
social and cultural aspects. Thus Chomsky reduces language studies 
to a technical perspective, claiming that ''*language as we already 
experience it is caused by language in the technical sense, through 
the mediating activity of certain performance systems*'' (164, authors' 
emphasis). In fact, where empirical scientists, such as the authors, 
allow themselves a certain amount of experiential friction and thus 
conceptual questioning, scientists such as Chomsky aim at avoiding 
empirical friction and at postponing conceptual questioning. Thus 
Chomskyan linguistics is concerned with an idealization, competence, 
which cannot be empirically investigated, and thinks that ''idealization 
takes us straight up to reality in the highest degree'' (167). 
Hence, ''language as a common human phenomenon is, from the 
perspective of the postulated invisible ideal, hardly language at all'' 
(167). This can only rests on the introduction by Chomsky ''of a 
mind/body dualism to downplay the importance of experience'' (167). 
Indeed, ''Chomsky is so certain of what the evidence *must* be 
evidence for, that he puts aside the question of what the evidence, if 
studied more closely, actually *might* be evidence for'' (171). 

Thus, the best that Chomskyan linguistics can do is 
investigate ''traditional grammar as it is integrated into our educational 
system and learned by most citizens'' (172), in other words, 
investigate our primal language as if it were a second language. The 
authors then turn to the vexed question of innate or learned to dismiss 
the distinction as too categorical. The developmental process of 
language acquisition is enculturation. Kanzi's spontaneous 
development of language ''indicates that the human environment that 
had this effect on him was not an artefact, but shaped by the fact that 
we too are primates'' (179), just as does human children's linguistic 
acquisition. The authors then turn to Tomasello's cultural account of 
language acquisition, based on specifically human and biologically 
based mindreading and imitation: this means that whereas human 
children would acquire language based on their mindreading and 
imitative abilities ('stealing adult language'), apes could only acquire it 
through ostension ('being given language by adults'). 
However, ''acquiring language is to a great extent a frighteningly and 
excitingly *creative and transforming process*'' (191, Authors' 
emphasis). We can only imitate what we already know how to do. 
Imitation chiefly works because we imitate conspecifics, apes like 
ourselves. Language is not transferred from adult to child anymore 
than it was transferred to Kanzi from his human entourage: 
it ''emerges (...) as an aspect of this dynamic life with others'' (194), as 
long as others are apes. Thus ''our biology is plastic and updateable: 
culture is our updated biology'' (195). Over-interpreting young apes is 
the way of leading them to verify these very interpretations: ''the fact 
that Kanzi has language means that he would speak and listen to you. 
The simplicity of the fact is its significance'' (199).

Then come the summary, i.e. ''The catalogue of design features'' (a list 
of the design features of language, as identified by the authors, with 
short commentaries) and two appendixes, the first a presentation of 
the apes in the LRC project with four bonobos on the human side and 
four bonobos on the bonobo side of the Pan/Homo culture, the 
second a description of the keyboard used as a communicative 
interface.

CRITICAL EVALUATION

'Kanzi's primal language' is a profoundly annoying book in that it both 
is very likeable and at the same time very disappointing. It presents 
some quite valuable insights, but these, even when explicitly 
presented as such, are buried beneath exaggerated and ill-argued 
claims. Maybe the most irritating feature of the book lies the reiterated 
and never argued assertion of Kanzi's language: it may be that Kanzi 
has language in a full-human sense, though this can mainly be 
assessed in the 1993 monograph in which experimental data 
comparing Kanzi's understanding of spoken English with that of a 18-
24 months old child was presented. Clearly his production is far from 
anything like a human language and even his understanding, as 
described in 1993, does not justify that assertion (for a discussion, 
see Anderson 2004 and my review, Reboul 2005). Thus, it strongly 
seems that the 'fact' of Kanzi's language resorts more to begging the 
question than to a proven scientific fact. Indeed, the whole book 
seems to be a circular attempt to change the scientific approach of 
language, based on the 'fact' of Kanzi's language, with the further 
goal of justifying that Kanzi indeed has language in a human sense 
through that change of scientific paradigm regarding language 
research. There may be examples of innocuous circularity, but it is 
hard not to see this specific attempt as viciously circular. 

Yet, there is much that is worth reading in this book, in addition to the 
extraordinary human-animal story involved in the relations between 
Kanzi and his human entourage, especially his relation with Savage-
Rumbaugh: for instance, for a pragmatist, much of what is said about 
language acquisition as a social process makes sense, though I would 
tend to insist that this is mainly the case for lexical acquisition. Again, 
up to a point, it may well be that such a social process of lexical 
acquisition could legitimately be described as an enculturation 
process, given the role of words in concept creation and acquisition in 
childhood (see, e.g. Waxman and Markow 1995), independently of 
any debatable linguistic relativity hypothesis. However, does it mean 
that Kanzi has language or that grammar is a mere theoretical 
construct with no or very little relation to language? This seems to be 
what the authors think, especially in view of their harsh criticism of 
Chomsky's research program in the last chapter of the book. 
However, there is no clear argument in the whole book which could 
reasonably lead to that conclusion. The most that could be claimed is 
that though Kanzi does not have language in the Chomskyan sense, 
Kanzi has language in the Savage-Rumbaughian sense. But this, 
presumably legitimate, claim reduces the whole project behind the 
book to a merely terminological quibble, whereas clearly the authors' 
aim was substantive: changing a scientific paradigm is not, after all, 
merely changing terminology and the question of whether Kanzi has 
anything like a human language, as opposed to a sophisticated 
human-induced communication system, remains. Does he?

As discussed by Anderson (2004), though Kanzi has some sort of 
grammar, as shown in the 1993 experiments, this does not seem to be 
a grammar on a par with human grammars as described by 
generativists. Of course, one can deny that such descriptions have 
any validity in describing languages and take them identical with the 
normative prescriptions used to teach grammar in school. However, 
contrary to the authors' claim in the last chapter, there are empirical 
investigations of such grammars, not only based on what the authors 
clearly take to be dubious empirical facts (i.e., non-attested examples, 
condemned as based on 'idealization'), but based on experimental 
data collected in psycho-linguistic experiments. What is more, some of 
this data is collected in young children, during language acquisition, 
and strongly justifies the Chomskyan view of grammar (for a host of 
highly interesting data of such kind, see Julien Musolino's website with 
downloadable papers: http://www.indiana.edu/%7Eplp/). Of course, it 
is still open to the authors to claim that grammar is epiphenomenal in 
language, and even in human language, but this comes very close to 
claiming that language is merely communication and in this case, the 
authors should go one step further and claim language not only for 
Kanzi and apes raised in human surroundings, but for all domestic 
animals (especially pets) and ultimately all animal species in which 
some form of communication exists. Given the fact that communication 
is widespread among animal species, this is clearly a slippery slope 
and one, what is more, that the authors cannot follow, given their 
ultimate goal, which seems to be a vindication of the claim that Kanzi 
has language in the human sense, this being explained through a 
common ape heritage.

Let me finish with a few words about the basis of this claim in the 
book. The book clearly sets aside the 1993 experiments, claiming that 
assessment of Kanzi's language can only be made through shared 
living with him. As clearly not everyone interested in whether Kanzi 
has language can share his everyday life, the book gives a host of 
anecdotal evidence for language in Kanzi and the other three 
bonobos 'on the human side of the Pan/Homo culture'. This is not the 
place to revive the controversy over the use of anecdotal evidence in 
animal studies: such evidence is probably valuable as long as it is 
taken cautiously and eventually leads to experimental evidence. What 
is interesting however is the content of the anecdotes given: in quite a 
few of them the evidence for language consists in what is called gaze 
alternation, i.e. in a communicative episode, the communicator looks 
at his addressee to evaluate the success of her communicative act 
and repeats it if it has failed (this is also the data proposed as 
evidence for reflexivity in Kanzi's language). This is taken as evidence 
for the fact that the communicator means something, in a Gricean 
sense, inside the shared Pan/Homo culture. 

However, and this is where the slippery slope raises its ugly head 
again, this kind of behaviour is evidenced in some domestic pets: cats 
and dogs do it routinely if their human owners do not satisfy their 
requests. In the same way, the authors devote part of the first chapter 
in discussing the fact that language is not made of sentences, given 
that isolated words can do proxy for sentences (e.g., ''Who 
came?''; ''John''). But recent work (see Kaminsky et al. 2004) shows 
that domestic dogs not only understand words but show fast mapping. 
On that count, the authors might reply that domestic animals, notably 
dogs, have developed a Canis/Homo culture (this, interestingly, is 
almost certainly a justified claim for most domestic animals: humans 
have a very long history of symbiotic living with other species and of 
modifying the very biology of these species. The recent acceleration 
of this process should not blind us to the fact that this is a process 
which has been going on for several thousands of years). But then 
what price the claim of the Pan/Homo culture as a natural extension of 
our shared primate nature, allowing for spontaneous acquisition of 
human language by non-human apes? We have a common culture 
with species with whom we do not share a primate culture and with 
whom we have developed communication, though we do not want to 
claim language for them...

Thus, 'Kanzi's primal language' is a highly annoying book, full of 
valuable insights in the nature of communication and culture as well as 
of more debatable claims about human language. The circular nature 
of the argumentation, resting on the petitio principii that Kanzi has 
language in the human sense, certainly does nothing to validate the 
authors' attempt to change scientific paradigms of language 
investigation or indeed their more general attempt to discredit 
idealization in scientific inquiry.

REFERENCES

Anderson, S. R. (2004), Dr. Dolittle's delusion. Animals and the 
uniqueness of human language, Harvard, Yale University Press. 

Hockett, C. F. (1963), ''The problems of universals in language'', in 
Greenberg, J.H. (ed.), Universals of language, Cambridge, MA, The 
MIT Press. 

Kaminsky, J., Call, J. and Fischer, J. (2004), ''Word learning in a 
domestic dog: Evidence for ''fast mapping'''', Science 304, 1682-1683.

Reboul, A. (2005), Review of Anderson (2004), 
http://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-706.html.

Savage-Rumbaugh, E. S., Murphy, J., Sevcic, R. A., Brakke, K. E., 
Williams, S. L. and Rumbaugh, D. M. (1993), Language 
comprehension in ape and child, Monographs of the Society for 
Research in Child Development, 233/58, 3-4.

Waxman, S. R. and Markow, D. B. (1998), ''Object properties and 
object kind: twenty-one-month-old infants' extension of novel 
adjectives'', Child Development 69, 1313-29. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Anne Reboul is a First Class Research Fellow at the French Center 
for Scientific Research (CNRS) in France. She has a Ph.D. in 
Linguistics (EHESS, Paris) and a Ph.D. in philosophy (University of 
Geneva, Switzerland). She has written some books, among which an 
Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Pragmatics and quite a few papers in 
French and English, on pragmatics and/or philosophic subjects. She 
has developed an interest in recent years in both language evolution 
and animal cognition and communication.





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