How close is the relationship between apes and Humans
...edit them. This will enable me to compare their abilities with those of humans and hopefully conclude whether the Hollywood ape is closer to bedrock than some think. There have been quite a few longitudinal studies of apes over the years. They usually consist of one experimenter acting as a sort of mother figure to one ape from birth. There have been different experiments where apes are taught ‘words’ by either using the objects themselves, computer images or coloured chips with the objects on. The trainer would then teach sign language to the ape by either physically moulding its hand or by a process of imitation. It was observed that apes could learn between 150 and 500 objects, verbs, adjectives and adverbs – making up the basis of our language. This doesn’t really compare to a human at the same stages of development, who can learn up to 10,000, but still shows evidence of a good basic memory. Trainers also reported cases of apes using sign in natural interactions with their mentors and latterly the passing on of this knowledge to their offspring. This, if nothing else, shows that apes, like humans, have mental representations in their minds of objects and actions. This is evidenced by the fact that they can learn and use single ‘words’ in the right context, but we should question whether they are able to link all the signs they have learnt to construct sentences in the same way that humans do? David Premack is one scientist who was interested in this. He conducted a 1976 experiment into what is known as causation, the relationship between cause and effect. Premack would show a number of images to the apes. The first two would be an object, firstly in its original form and then the same image but with a slight variable (e.g. 1st image = an apple. 2nd image = an apple with a bit sliced off). Next Premack would show a selection of random images one of which could have caused the change in the first two (e.g. a knife to cut apple). The ape would chose one of the images with, it seems, impressive results. Premack recorded one ape getting 77 correct out of 100 when tested on a number of different images, much higher than would be expected on chance, and demonstrating the basics of prepositional thought. Some investigators believed apes to have the ability to take this a step further and construct sentences based on the syntactic principles of human speech. Evidence of this comes particularly from an ape named Washoe. Washoe would sign the words WASHOE TICKLE YOU or YOU TICKLE WASHOE, depending on his desires. This points to Washoe having the ability to follow a set of rules for word combinations, in other words a grammar. There is no doubt that the results of these experiments are impressive. However when studied below the surface there are a number of potential faults in the experiments and evidence of big differences between the animal learning of language when compared with human. There have been a number of experiments comparing the learning of human infants against apes of the same age. The most comprehensive was Terrace et al (1979) whose findings fuelled many people to argue that there is no link between the two species and that apes have no linguistic abilities. ...