Planet Word

by J. P. Davidson

  The earliest talking animal story to generate serious scientific research was probably Hans the Counting Horse. His owner, a late nineteenth-century German maths teacher called Wilhelm von Osten, believed that animals were much more intelligent than humans gave them credit for. Von Osten decided to prove his theory by teaching mathematics to a cat, a bear and a horse. The cat and the bear were indifferent, but the horse, an Arab stallion called Hans, showed promise. If Von Osten chalked a number on a blackboard, Hans would use his hoof to tap the number out – a chalked number 4 would produce four taps of the hoof. Questions on addition, subtraction, fractions and spelling could all be answered by Hans with the tapping of his hoof. Word of the clever horse spread, and Von Osten began to exhibit Hans in free shows all over Germany. Huge crowds gathered to watch Hans answer questions posed by his master. ‘What is the square root of nine?’ ‘If the fifth day of the month falls on a Monday, what is the date of the following Thursday?’ Hans would be asked to spell out words with taps – one tap for A, two taps for B, and so on. His answers were almost 90 per cent correct.

  The German board of education assembled a panel of experts to study this equine genius, and in 1904 the Hans Commission, which included two zoologists, a psychologist and a circus manager, reported that it could find no signs of trickery and that Hans’ abilities appeared to be genuine.

  The investigation was passed on to a psychologist, Oskar Pfungst, who after careful observation came up with a ground-breaking conclusion. Hans the Horse only gave the correct answer when he could see the questioner and the questioner knew what the answer was. Pfungst had watched Von Osten closely and noticed that as the horse’s taps approached the correct answer, von Osten’s body posture and facial expressions changed. They became tenser, and then relaxed when the horse made the final, correct tap. This relaxing was the cue to Hans to stop his hoof tapping. Thus Hans the horse was shown to be an animal not so much of great intelligence but rather one of great sensitivity to body language. An animal instinct, in fact. Oskar Pfungst’s insight came to be known as the Clever Hans Effect – the influence a questioner’s cues may exert on their subject, both human and animal.

  Hans the Counting Horse and his trainer Wilhelm von Osten

  Project Pigeon during the Second World War was an attempt by American behaviourist B. F. Skinner to develop a pigeon-guided missile. A lens which could reflect an image of the target on a screen was put in the nose of a bomb; a pigeon trained to recognize the target was placed inside the bomb as well and would peck the screen whenever the missile went off target. Project Pigeon never got off the ground, as pigeon pecking was overshadowed by the development of electronic guidance systems.

  It was just one of the many projects Skinner developed as part of his belief that all animals can learn and change behaviour and that language is simply an extension of learned behaviour. His best-known invention was the Skinner Box – or the operant conditioning chamber. The box contained one or more levers which an animal could press and one or more places from which food could be dispensed. Skinner would put a rat or a pigeon into the box and showed that the animals quickly learned that they would get food every time they pressed the lever. Skinner asserted that they would only manipulate the lever if they were rewarded for the action, a process he called ‘shaping’. He expanded his theory to conclude that human behaviour, including language, is learned from our environment. There is no difference between the learning that takes place in humans and that of other animals. If Skinner was right, and language is learned and not instinctive, then every animal with intelligence of a certain level should be able to learn to talk and can be nurtured to use language.

  A US Navy-trained dolphin used to locate mines and torpedoes

  What Do Dolphins Talk About?

  Dolphins have long been recognized as one of the smartest of all the mammals, with their own highly evolved system of communication of clicks and whistles. In the 1960s, American scientists began to study the complex brain of dolphins and analyse how they communicated with each other and, what’s more, whether we could communicate with them. It wasn’t long before the US military got interested. Imagine an intelligent animal, able to understand and follow instructions, swimming undetected through enemy waters.

  In 1964, Dwight ‘Wayne’ Batteau was funded by the US Navy to develop a man/dolphin communicator. He described the project as ‘a program of research intended to determine the feasibility of establishing a language, approaching English, between man and dolphin’. An electronic device called a transphonometer was designed to convert the vowels and consonants of humans into whistles. These sounds were transmitted underwater, and the dolphins reproduced the whistles. Specially trained Navy personnel were able to learn this whistle language and communicate with trained dolphins.

  Batteau drowned in 1967 before the project was completed, and since then most of the information about the Navy’s work with dolphins has been classified. However, we know that dolphins have been trained to attach explosives and listening devices to enemy ships and submarines. And in the Gulf wars dolphins were used to search the seabed for mines. The man/dolphin communicator may have enabled humans to issue commands to dolphins, but there is no evidence that this is more than say a sheepdog’s ability to learn and respond to the commands of its master. Batteau’s dolphins didn’t talk back – in whistles or otherwise.

  Researcher John C. Lilly tried to teach dolphins to talk like humans and claimed in the 1960s that he had trained them to replicate the alphabet. Recordings made at his research centre in the Virgin Islands do have a few examples of dolphins apparently echoing human sounds in high-pitched squeaks, but there was no evidence of dolphins actually uttering human words.

  Since then, dolphin-language research studies have concentrated on proving that dolphins can understand and interpret human language rather than replicate it, which is a lot more sensible, as the dolphin’s anatomy is not suitable for making human sounds.

  In the 1980s, a female bottlenose dolphin was the subject of Louis Herman’s animal-language studies at the Kewalo Basin Marine Mammal Laboratory in Hawaii. Researchers used a sign language which allowed them to give the dolphins highly complex instructions. For example, ‘left basket right ball’ asks the dolphin to put the ball on her right into the basket on her left. But ‘right basket left ball’ means the opposite – put the ball on the left into the basket on the right. The results were published in 1984 in the human psychology journal Cognition. ‘The dolphins were able to account for both the meaning of words and how word order affects the meaning,’ said Herman.

  So far the dream of dialogue between man and dolphins remains just that. Dolphins clearly have a complex sound system, but we’re a long way off from interpreting the meaning of their clicks and whistles. Never mind conversing with them, we still don’t know what they’re saying to each other. Is it ontological discussions on the future of the planet or simply ‘Let’s go get some salmon to eat’? As one language expert comments, ‘Their capacity for communication could range from the level of a dog barking all the way to possible talking.’

  The most impressive interspecies language experiments have been with primates, our closest relatives. Noam Chomsky and his followers argue that the ability for language developed in humans after the evolutionary split between humans and primates. They point to the ease with which children acquire language. Children, they insist, have an innate propensity for language which primates simply do not possess. According to Chomsky, it was ‘about as likely that an ape will prove to have a language ability as there is an island somewhere with flightless birds waiting for humans to teach them to fly’.

  In the 1970s Herbert Terrace, a psychologist at Columbia University, brought a baby chimp (playfully named Nim Chimpsky after the famous linguist) to the LaFarge family in New York. Nim was treated just like one of the family. He had seven human siblings and he was carried everywhere for the first year by his surrogate mother, Stephanie LaFarge. He ate human food,
wore nappies and clothes, brushed his teeth at night and – somewhat unusually for a child – enjoyed a cigarette and a cup of coffee. Nim was taught American sign language at home and in a classroom built specially at Colombia.

  As Nim hit the terrible twos he became too difficult for the LaFarges to look after. He was moved to a mansion owned by the university and was cared for by a series of handlers. After four years, Terrace announced that Nim had a vocabulary of more than 100 words, but in 1977, after the chimp severely bit one of his teachers, Project Nim was stopped. When the results of the project were published, Terrace declared it a failure. He said that, while he was watching a video of Nim signing with a teacher, he realized that the chimp was imitating most of the signs but he almost never made a sign spontaneously. Herbert had tried to avoid the Clever Hans Effect but in the end he concluded that Nim and other chimps who had been taught to sign were merely imitating rather than using language. Compared with a human child, Nim rarely added new word combinations and seemed to have no idea of syntax or the elementary rules of grammar. Chomsky, it seemed, had been right. Nim would never use language in the way humans do – using grammar to form sentences and express ideas. He never asked a question.

  Nim Chimpsky and researcher both signing ‘drink’

  After the collapse of the project, no one quite knew what to do with Nim, this chimp who had been raised to believe he was a boy. He’d never been in a cage before or met other chimpanzees. There was a public outcry after he was sold to a laboratory of experimental medicine. Nim’s surrogate sister Jenny Lee told a reporter: ‘How do you reconcile a tiny chimp in blue blankets, drinking from a bottle and wearing Pampers … and then, when he is ten – him in a lab, in a cage, with nothing soft, nothing warm, with no people? This is my brother. This is somebody I raised.’

  Nim was eventually offered a home in an animal sanctuary in Texas, where he spent hours looking through old magazines and trying to sign to keepers. Other chimps were introduced as companions, but Nim always relished human companionship. He died of a heart attack in March 2000, aged twenty-six.

  The latest celebrity ‘talking’ primate is Kanzi, a bonobo chimpanzee who has been taught to ‘speak’ by pointing at lexigram symbols on a computer. On his keyboard are hundreds of colourful symbols representing all the words that he knows. Not just easy words like ball and banana and tickle but difficult concept words like later and from. When he touches the symbol the word is repeated out loud. What excites primatologist Dr Sue Savage-Rumbaugh at Iowa’s Great Ape Trust is that Kanzi is putting two-word sentences together. For instance, the word ‘flood’ isn’t on the lexigram, so when there was a flood in Iowa, Kanzi pointed out two words big and water. He was given kale to eat and, finding it difficult to chew, he pointed at slow and lettuce.

  Kanzi also seems to have developed theory of mind, a skill closely linked to human language. It means he is able to imagine the world from another person’s point of view. When he noticed one of the researchers had a missing finger, he asked ‘hurt?’ And he uses language creatively. Kanzi was told that a Swedish scientist called Pår Segerdahl was coming to visit and was bringing him some bread. There was no symbol on the lexigram for scientist so Kanzi pointed to the symbols for bread and pear. When he was asked if he was talking about Pår or pears to eat, he pointed to the scientist.

  Researchers have observed that Kanzi makes the same four sounds for four words: banana, grape, juice and yes. Could this be the beginnings of speech, or is it no more significant than a dog who gives a particular bark when it sees its master? Critics say Kanzi is reacting to body language and that researchers interpret his use of words too creatively. Dr Savage-Rumbaugh has tried to avoid the Clever Hans Effect by conducting some of her tests sitting very still and wearing a welder’s mask so Kanzi can’t see her face. She makes a series of unlikely requests, like ‘put the pine needles in the fridge’, which Kanzi almost always understands.

  The debate continues. We’re certainly not imagining a future world of prattling primates as in Planet of the Apes. Perhaps the most useful way to look at it is this: just as Kanzi has turned out to be an accomplished crafter and user of stone tools, including some very sharp knives (which helps scientists understand skills used by our early prehistoric ancestors), so, at the very least, these talking experiments allow us a fascinating glimpse of a stage in the evolution of human language. But in the end the crucial difference is our brains. They are nearly four times the size of a chimp’s. It’s all about that extra kilo of grey matter.

  Grey Matter

  With advances in medical technologies, science is at last beginning to penetrate one of the greatest mysteries of nature: that three pounds of mushy grey matter lodged between our ears, the human brain, the bodily organ which you are using to understand these words. Its ability to learn and process language is one of the true wonders of the universe.

  Professor Cathy Price works at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at the University College London medical school, one of the foremost research centres in neuroscience. Her research programme aims to create an anatomical model of how language works. Using structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRIs, those huge doughnut-like machines which scan the body to create a three-dimensional image), she hopes to build a picture of which parts of the brain are used to process language. As is so often the case with the workings of the body, the insights into how they work are most evident when they stop working – jaundice tells us about the function of the liver in a way that a healthy liver simply cannot. Much of her research concerns how speech and reading are lost and recovered following strokes, when different parts of the brain are knocked out.

  Cathy candidly confesses that, though she’s been studying the brain for a very long time, very little is understood. In fact, she says we are in the process of unlearning and dismantling what we thought we knew as these new techniques for looking into the fissures and folds of the brain are developed.

  The classical view: the two major language centres of the brain

  This classical view of the brain is the one we are familiar with from textbooks. Right, left hemisphere, cerebral cortex, cerebellum, basal ganglia, limbic system … It was Paul Broca, a French surgeon, anthropologist and member of the Academie Française, who first noticed that people who had suffered strokes in a certain area of the left inferior frontal lobe had problems with speech production. In 1868, he presented his findings to the British Association in Norwich, and in recognition of his pioneering work not long after it was decided to name this part of the brain Broca’s area. A Prussian neuropathologist called Carl Wernicke, reading Broca’s research, did his own and found out that his stroke patents who had suffered damage to the posterior left hemisphere had problems with speech comprehension rather than production. So this area of the brain was called Wernicke’s area. For a century and a half these two areas were believed to be the parts of the brain where language production and language comprehension were situated. Research by people like Cathy is now causing that theory to be revised.

  What is now evident is that language occupies a far greater part of the overall brain’s activity than just the Broca and Wernicke areas – more than half the brain appears to be involved in some speech-related function. There are so many factors: the breathing, the shaping of the tongue and lips, fine motor control of facial muscles, control of the vocal chords, and that’s before any of the cognition processes begin. And here’s where the mystery deepens. Where does memory reside? How is it tapped? Do thoughts control language, and how do we then process the thought into the language we want? How does that work for bilingual or multilingual speakers?

  ‘I used to think my aim was to be able to understand language in the brain,’ says Cathy. ‘I’ve now reached the stage of my life where I don’t think it’s going to happen within my lifetime, and now I have much more specific aims as to how I can apply the information I have for clinical use. So I’ve gone from this big ambition – will we ever und
erstand it? – down to much more specific aims that I think might be clinically beneficial.’

  Cathy hopes that one day we will be able to have a more meaningful interpretation of how the brain works, but at present we don’t have a coherent story into which all the pieces fit. We might be able to colour it, make models of it, say this bit is working when we ask for a cup of tea and this bit when we feel anger or love, but the really big questions concerning the actual physiological nature of the organ are yet to be answered. So far, we’ve only just scratched the surface.

  So have Cathy’s researches made her swing one way or another in the whole nature versus nurture debate as to how language is acquired? Her practical investigations into grey matter have made her believe there is a primal language structure in the brain, and it is remarkably consistent in all individuals, across all cultures and irrespective of whether the language is spoken, signed or even read as Braille.

  So how, then, did this primal proto-human language emerge?

  Noam Chomsky, father of modern linguistics

  Noam Chomsky

  Noam Chomksy could be said to have invented modern linguistics. Of course, he is much more than this, but a half century of teaching, writing and being on the public stage has done little to reduce the public perception that Noam Chomsky is modern linguistics. His ground-breaking theory that homo sapiens has an innate language ability, and all grammars and syntax are essentially the same and hard-wired into our brains, remains his major contribution in the field.

  Seeing how quickly and easily children learn language without any seeming effort, Chomsky posited that there is a ‘Language Acquisition Device’ (LAD) which is unique to humans. It’s this LAD, deep within our brains, that enables us to speak, whereas kittens or dormice are mute. According to Chomsky, there is a deep-set ‘Universal Grammar’ common to every human language.