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In the mid 1970's, while still a college undergraduate, I moved into a 37-room mansion on the New York Palisades with a baby chimpanzee as part of a grand experiment: The experiment was called Project Nim Chimpsky, directed by Herbert S. Terrace and Thomas Bever at Columbia University, where our subject was a male chimpanzee. My charge was to be the ape's "mother," and to raise him just like a child, while attempting to teach him American Sign Language. Though only an undergraduate, for the next few years, I was to be the Project's coordinator and primary teacher. In addition to the day-to-day challenge of living with a wild animal--the sheer danger of these animals is one of the best kept secrets among ape-language researchers--my responsibilities included the design of experimental studies and data collection procedures, developing teaching methods for working with the ape, sign language instruction to project members, and data analyses and interpretation. This was a lot for a college undergraduate, but how could I do otherwise? Our question was tantalizing, age-old, and it was the grandest attempt to answer it in this century: Is human language entirely "learnable" (and "teachable") entirely from environmental input? Or are there aspects of our capacity for language that are biological endowed? Indeed are we alone the possessors of language on this planet? I knew that answering this question would give me unique insights into the essence of being human--and, in the process, I would discover secrets of the mind of the ape. After years of analyzing Nim's (and other apes') "language," we concluded that ape "language" differed from us, and we placed most of the blame with the ape's inability to achieve human-like syntax. But I knew something else was different. I also knew that the clues would lie in intensive study of the very early processes by which humans acquire language. Unfortunately, little was known about the earliest mechanisms that our species employ to begin and maintain language acquisition, and little was known about how our species learned the signed languages to which these apes were being exposed.
For the past 20 years, I have conducted studies on very early human spoken and signed language acquisition and adult language representation in the brain. The results from these studies have enabled me to advance a theory about the brain's mechanisms and environmental factors that together determine language acquisition and cerebral organization for language in our species. And I have amassed crucial answers concerning the most perplexing questions about our closest relatives: Why are they so similar yet so different from us? Why is it that they still fail to master key aspects of human language grammar even when you give them ways to bypass their inability to speak like us? What is this elusive difference? Are humans and apes as evolutionary close as we once thought? And, on the more personal end, what was day-to-day life like with a chimpanzee? What was it like to live with a chimpanzee? What does the ape know? Talking apes: What are they really saying? (See Petitto's ape related publications.) |
