Sundberg, M. L. (1996).
Toward granting linguistic competence to apes: A review of Savage-Rumbaugh et al.'s Language Comprehension in Ape and Child.
Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior,
65, 477-492.
Savage-Rumbaugh et al.'s (1993) monograph describes a study that
compared the language comprehension of an 8-year-old ape (a bonobo
named Kanzi) with that of a normal 2-year-old human (Alia). The
primary purpose of the research was to see if Kanzi could
comprehend novel and compound spoken English commands without
imitative prompts, contrived reinforcement contingencies, or
explicit training procedures. As it turned out, Kanzi acquired a
complex comprehension repertoire in a pattern similar to the
human child's and even performed better than the human child in
many cases. Although this review describes these empirical
results favorably, it questions the authors' claim that the
subjects learned the repertoire on their own, without
reinforcement or training. A close examination of the subjects'
histories and of the procedures, transcripts, and videos
suggested that the training and testing procedures involved a
number of independent variables and processes that were not
discussed by the authors, including conditioned reinforcement and
punishment, verbal prompts, stimulus control, establishing
operations, and extinction. Nonetheless, the methodological and
empirical contributions to ape and human language research are
substantial and deserve behavior analysts' attention and support.
Behavior analysts could contribute to this kind of research by
applying the analytic and conceptual tools of behavior analysis
in general and the concepts from Verbal Behavior (Skinner,
1957) in particular.
Key words: apes, verbal comprehension, verbal behavior, novel
behavior, nonhuman verbal behavior