|
Des Moines, Iowa – October 17, 2005 – A new book authored by scientists
at Great Ape Trust of Iowa, delivers additional insight into the acquisition
of language by the most famous bonobo chimpanzee in the world, Kanzi. Kanzi’s
Primal Language: The Cultural Initiation of Primates into Language was written
by William Fields and Dr. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh of Great Ape Trust and Dr. Par
Segerdahl of Uppsala University of Sweden.
Kanzi’s Primal Language offers important new knowledge into
how culture and language interlace in early childhood by showing how Kanzi originally
acquired language when he was a young ape – spontaneously in a culture
he shared with humans.
“Kanzi’s language acquisition overthrows the theoretical framework
in which people have tried to imagine what it means for a child to develop language – it
is neither innate nor learned through training or imitation,” says Fields. “Language
is a spontaneous companion to how one tangibly lives and serves as a reflection
of the ideational system that emerges as an aspect of cultural ontogeny and development.
You don’t teach the brain language any more than you teach the brain to
think.”
Published
by Palgrave Macmillan, Kanzi’s Primal Language will
help the scientific community, and the general public, better understand the
similarity between humans and apes - similarities that extend even to language.
“We should never think in limiting terms what anyone can do, whether
it’s an ape or a human,” says Fields. “If you provide apes
every opportunity to fully express themselves, and early enough in their lives,
they will do things you thought they wouldn’t or couldn’t do.”
Fields began his scientific research with bonobos in 1998 at the Language
Research Center (LRC) at Georgia State University in Atlanta where he developed
a novel anthropological approach of ape language research. Fields joined Great
Ape Trust of Iowa in the spring of 2005, when a family of eight bonobos, including
Kanzi, was transferred there from the LRC. Great Ape Trust is a world-class scientific
research facility dedicated to understanding the origins and future of culture,
language, tools and intelligence in great apes.
 Dr. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh's work on the language capabilities of the bonobo
Kanzi has intrigued the world because of its far-reaching implications for understanding
the evolution of the human language. The first scientist doing language research
with bonobos, Savage-Rumbaugh joined Great Ape Trust following a 23-year association
with the LRC at Georgia State University.
At the LRC, Savage-Rumbaugh helped pioneer the use of a number of new technologies
for working with primates. These include a keyboard which provides for speech
synthesis, allowing the animals to communicate using spoken English, and a "primate
friendly" computer-based joystick terminal that permits the automated presentation
of many different computerized tasks. Information developed at the center regarding
the abilities of non-human primates to acquire symbols, comprehend spoken words,
decode syntactical structures, learn concepts of number and quantity, and perform
complex perceptual-motor tasks has helped change the way humans view other members
of the primate order.
Savage-Rumbaugh's work with Kanzi was detailed in Language Comprehension in
Ape and Child published in Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development
(1993). It was selected by the "Millennium Project" as one of the top
100 most influential works in cognitive science in the 20th century by the University
of Minnesota Center for Cognitive Sciences in 1991. Dr. Savage-Rumbaugh's work
is also featured in Apes, Language and the Human Mind (Oxford Press, 1996) and
Kanzi: The Ape at the
Brink of the Human Mind (John Wiley & Sons, 1995).
Par Segerdahl is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Centre for Bioethics
at the Karolinska Institute and Uppsala University in Sweden. He has published
several philosophical inquiries into language in British and American journals,
and in his book Language Use (1996). He currently leads a research project studying
the concept of natural behavior in domestic animals.
 Great Ape Trust of Iowa is located five miles southeast of downtown Des Moines
on 230 acres of lowlands, riverine forest and lakes. When completed, Great Ape
Trust will be the largest great ape facility in North America and one of the
first worldwide to include all four types of great ape – bonobos, chimpanzees,
gorillas and orangutans – for noninvasive interdisciplinary studies of
their cognitive and communicative capabilities.
Great Ape Trust is dedicated to providing sanctuary and an honorable life
for great apes, studying the intelligence of great apes, advancing conservation
of great apes and providing unique educational experiences about great apes.
Great Ape Trust of Iowa is a 501(c) 3 not-for-profit organization and is certified
by the American Zoo and Aquarium Association (AZA). To learn more about Great
Ape Trust of Iowa, go to www.GreatApeTrust.org.
For more information, contact:
Al Setka
Director of Communications
Great Ape Trust of Iowa
4200 S.E. 44th Avenue
Des Moines, IA 50320
(515) 243-3580
515.720.7430 (cell)
asetka@greatapetrust.org
|
