Kanzi: The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind (37 page)

Third, unlike the previous program, in which individuals were taught request skills,
no direct teaching
was to take place. The children were encouraged but not required to use the keyboard in the communication opportunities that occurred in their daily events.

The fourth component involved the children’s adult partners and their active role in communication. After instruction in use of the system, the adults employed the keyboard in ways we had done with Kanzi. That is, they discussed what was going to happen, made comments, or asked questions, all using normal spoken sentences, but hitting the keyboard as well at appropriate times. For instance, a parent might say, “Johnny, let’s go
outside
and ride your
bike,”
where “outside” and “bike” appear as lexigrams on the keyboard.

Last, Mary Ann and her colleagues needed a way to monitor the children’s progress; they achieved this through a Teacher/Parent questionnaire.

At the end of the two-year program, Mary Ann and her colleagues had amassed more than 31,000 communicative events, collected as audiotaped interactions, which were then transcribed. All the children eventually acquired a vocabulary of
symbols, though the size range was large. The lexigrams in the children’s vocabularies were those they had effectively chosen to learn, not those their teachers had wished them to learn, just as Kanzi had extracted from his language environment those words that were most salient to his life. All the children learned to use the symbols in clear communicative ways, often accompanied by naturalistic gestures. “In general, the SAL permitted the youths to convey specific information that their partners could respond to, thus promoting the initiation as well as the continuation of conversations and the addition of new information,” remarked Mary Ann and Rose, in a report of the program.
¹⁶

As had been observed in an earlier study of mentally retarded individuals using the Sherman and Austin instructional regime, there emerged two classes of learning patterns in this program, beginning and advanced. The four youths who displayed the beginning learning pattern acquired production and comprehension skills only slowly, and had a small vocabulary at the end, between twenty and thirty lexigrams. The advanced learners acquired large vocabularies (some with more than two hundred lexigrams) and developed comprehension and production simultaneously and rapidly. Individuals in this group also learned to use combinations of lexigrams and other symbolic skills, including the recognition of printed English words and categorization.

Mary Ann and Rose were able to identify the underlying cause of the difference in performance between these two groups by comparing results of certain language and cognitive tests that had been administered prior to the study. “The salient factor that distinguished the two groups was the speech comprehension skills they demonstrated at the onset of the study,” they noted.

We suggest, then, that individuals who comprehended speech prior to the onset of the study readily extracted the critical visual information from the environment, paired it with their spoken language knowledge, processed it, and produced symbolic communications. Individuals with limited comprehension abilities apparently were confronted with a different task. They had to segment the visual component of the signal, develop a set of visually based symbol experiences, process the visual information, and then first
comprehend and later produce symbolic communications.
¹⁷

The importance of comprehension in the process of language acquisition has emerged repeatedly, both in ape and in human studies.

Early in the Clayton County Public Schools program, teachers and parents asked Rose to include in the lexigram vocabulary words that help mediate normal social interaction, such as
please, thank you, I’m finished, help, yes, no, and goodbye
. The children incorporated these words into their productive vocabulary surprisingly quickly. These social-regulative words were used frequently in the context of social interaction, but there was no overall increase in the use of the SAL as a result. People who interacted with the children very much appreciated their ability to communicate in a way that had the semblance of being “more like a normal child.” This is important, because one of the aims of giving mentally retarded children the ability to communicate is that they should be able to become more a part of the outside world. Strangers’ perceptions of such children are significant in the children’s acceptance in that outside world.

Just as Bev, Connie, and Ruth had become more sociable through their exposure to language training, so too did the children in the Clayton County study. Rose recalls that the mentally retarded children in the study at one school, although they were mainstreamed for lunch times, regularly used to segregate themselves as a group, eating together at one table. “Within a few months of the beginning of the study, our kids were everywhere,” recounts Rose. “They were talking to their regular education peers, ordering food in line like everybody else. What had happened? They now had a way of communication among themselves and with others.”
¹⁸

One day she observed Bob, who was part of the study, talking to his peer tutor, Ralph, using the SAL. A friend of Ralph’s came up and started talking to Ralph while ignoring Bob. Ralph said that if his friend wanted to join in the conversation, he would have to use the SAL. Hesitantly, the friend began to do so, and soon said to Bob, “Let’s go
outside
to the
playground.” Bob said yes and the three boys went out as a normal social trio, to play. “These findings highlight the role the SAL may play in mediating or advancing interactive skills between peers,” comment Mary Ann and Rose. “Speech output communication devices may be one important means of enhancing social interactions with nondisabled as well as disabled peer communication partners.”
¹⁹

Stories such as those of Bob and his friend are common among the Clayton County children in the study, and give substance to the once unthinkable idea that such children can indeed function in society, and can even contribute in the workplace. To this end, Mary Ann and her colleagues have established Project FACTT (Facilitating Augmentative Communication Through Technology), a collaborative effort between Georgia State University and Clayton County Public Schools. Soon, children who not long ago would have been considered as beyond hope of help, will be doing useful jobs and communicating with fellow employees and their employer. That represents enormous progress from the idea that took Duane “just a few seconds of thought” to come up with in the winter of 1970. “Our understanding of language through the study of chimps has overshot our expectations by a thousand percent,” Duane now says. “I had no idea that chimps would one day be shown to acquire language spontaneously, as human children do, nor that the ape work would inform so powerfully what can be achieved with mentally retarded children.”
²⁰

There is still a great deal to be learned about how language interacts with the cognitive development of mentally retarded children, but all the evidence points to the importance of engendering language skills in them. And if Mary Ann can achieve her goal of getting ever younger children—even toddlers—into SAL programs, further progress is surely inevitable. The mother of one of the Clayton County children once said to her: “You’ve done so much for my son, but, oh how I wish you’d had him when he was two. Who knows how much you could have done for him by now?”

*
The names of the individuals who took part in the research experiments discussed in this chapter have been changed to protect their identities.

8

At the Wenner-Gren conference we were finding that one by one the great “Definitions of Man” were falling. The belief that man alone can transmit cultural acts had vanished with the early observation of potato washing in Japanese macaques by Junichiro Itani; once this custom originated, mothers passed it on to their offspring. The belief that man alone can make tools had gone by the wayside in the first years of Jane Goodall’s observations in the field. The belief that man alone has language has taken a little longer to fall and is more controversial, but my fellow scientists at “the castle” were beginning to recognize that this, too, was to become a controversy of the past. Nick Toth, the resident expert on stone-tool construction, was wondering if another monolith might fall. Are humans really the only creatures that can use tools to make other tools, he wondered?

When Nick initially posed this question to me, I was uncertain as to whether he really wanted to find out, or whether he was trying, like so many before him, to shore up yet another concise description of man that could neatly distinguish humans from other creatures in a completely definitive manner. It was the end of a long day at the conference, and we had all eaten dinner at a restaurant in the nearby town. A good measure of wine had been drunk, light-hearted banter had mixed with shop talk, and some members of the group had entertained us with a bout of spontaneous
music making. As well as being a fine archeologist, Nick turned out to be a gifted and enthusiastic musician. On our return to the conference hotel, I was sitting near the rear of the bus and Nick was in the very back, legs stretched out, arms folded across his chest, eyes closed, apparently asleep. Suddenly, he opened an eye and beckoned me to join him. “I have something I want to ask you,” he said. “Do you think Kanzi could learn to make stone tools, the way early humans did?”

I hadn’t talked much to Nick by that point in the conference, and I had formed the impression that he was an archeologist who didn’t like psychology. His question seemed to come out of the blue, and was something I had never thought of trying. From my long experience with chimpanzees, I had gained a great respect for their abilities. I knew that common chimps and bonobos were skilled manipulators of objects in experimental situations, and of course was aware of the many kinds of tool behavior that common chimps display in the wild. My already keen respect for their abilities was increased by the conference presentations of Bill McGrew and Christophe Boesch. Bill pointed out that not only do chimpanzees make tools, but they essentially have a tool kit, meaning that they use similar tools for different ends (for example, they use sticks for termite fishing and as weapons) and they accomplish similar ends with different tools (for example, one chimpanzee was observed to use four different tools in the process of extracting honey from a bees’ nest). Christophe described the complexity of tool-use for nut cracking in the Ivory Coast chimpanzees. These chimps use both a hammer and an anvil, often for as long as two hours per day. Hammers can be either suitable wooden clubs or rounded stones. The anvils are generally indentations on stones or tree limbs. Both hammers and nuts must be carried to these anvils, which themselves are part of a surface that cannot be transported. The tools and nuts are regularly carried over a hundred meters to anvils. The wooden hammers are constructed by the apes themselves and the stone hammers are carefully selected and in high demand. Christophe has even observed instances in which mothers appeared to be teaching their infants nut-cracking techniques.

But making stone tools is quite another matter. It seemed light years beyond what apes were currently doing. No one had ever seen a chimp intentionally make a flake. Some of Christophers chimps had accidentally broken off stone fragments while attempting to crack nuts, but no chimps had ever been seen to use a serendipitously produced flake as a tool. Indeed, even I could not make a worthwhile stone tool, and I had had Nick there to teach me.

“That sounds like a fascinating idea,” I replied to Nick. “But isn’t stone tool-making a bit advanced for apes?” I had never seen Kanzi, or even the more dexterous Sherman and Austin, attempt to make stone flakes. And, like most people, I assumed stone tool-making was a
human
activity requiring
human
skills. Nevertheless, I was intrigued. “What do you have in mind?” I asked. Nick sat up, and quickly explained.