In the beginning was the "name".

In emphasizing the ability to generate sentences as a uniquely human skill, psycholinguists have overlooked an equally important and perhaps more fundamental skill the ability to refer with names. The same oversight can be attributed to the first generation of projects devoted to teaching an ape to use a language. In the absence of referential naming, it is doubtful that syntax would have developed in human languages. Accordingly, students of human language, as well as those researchers who seek to establish linguistic skills in nonhuman subjects, for example, Savage-Rumbaugh and her associates, should reap handsome dividends by continuing their efforts to examine critically the ontogeny of naming. At least as much as any other ability, the ability to name has provided a unique impetus to the evolution of human language. Recent attempts to teach apes basic features of human languages and the reactions to such efforts constitute an unusual chapter in the history of psychology. Few, if any, research programs that have generated such widespread interest have had to endure a subsequent reaction that has bordered on benign neglect. The reasons for this abrupt succession of attitudes are numerous and complex. It is, however, not too much of an oversimplification to observe that a major factor was the emphasis that these studies placed on demonstrating grammatical competence in apes. That emphasis, which reflected the strong focus o f psycholinguists during the 1960s and 1970s on the grammatical competence of children, stimulated ape language projects to set goals for themselves that were unrealistically ambitious. Appraisals of these projects focused almost exclusively on the extent to which they succeeded in training an ape to acquire certain rudimentary grammatical rules. (See Mounin, 1976, and Terrace, 1979a, for exceptions.) As a result, some essential nongrammatical aspects of language use by apes were neglected, both by the researchers who conducted those projects and by their critics. The current negative attitude toward research on an ape's linguistic ability is unfortunate if for no other reason than that attention may be diverted from important aspects of an ape's ability to communicate symbolically, however primitive that ability may be. Crucial to our understanding of human language is a clear specification of the differences (and similarities) that exist between human and nonhuman use of symbols. In a later section of this article, I will discuss some recent studies that pose more productive comparisons of human and pongid linguistic competence than those posed by earlier studies. Before turning to that work, I will try to make clear why and how earlier research on language learning by apes went awry. (See Ristau & Robbins, 1982, for a thorough summary of the literature on attempts to teach language to apes.) Initial Goals and Findings of Studies of Ape Language Though differing in details of methodology and in the explicitness of their initial goals, the independent projects started by the Gardners (1969, 1975a, 1975b) and by Premack ( 1970, 1971) shared a common point of departure. Both sought to reverse earlier failures to teach chimpanzees to communicate with spoken words by shifting from a vocal to a visual medium of communication. Given Lieberman's observation that the human and chimpanzee vocal apparatuses differ significantly (Lieberman, 1968, 1975), it seemed reasonable to appeal to a chimpanzee's inability to articulate human phones as an explanation of various failures to teach home-reared infant chimpanzees to speak English or Russian (Hayes, 1951; Hayes & Hayes, 1951; Kellogg & Kellogg, 1933/1967; Khouts, 1935). The Gardners sought to reverse those failures by teaching a chimpanzee to use American Sign Language (ASL), a natural language used by thousands of deaf Americans. ASL was the main medium of communication between Washoe (an infant female chimpanzee) and her caretakers and between the caretakers themselves while in Washoe's presence. Premack, who started an independent project at roughly the same time the Gardners began theirs, taught the principal subject of his study (a juvenile female chimpanzee named Sarah) to use an artificial visual language consisting of plastic chips of different colors and shapes. Rather than waiting for language to emerge spontaneously, as one might with a child or with a home-reared chimpanzee, Premack devised specific training procedures for teaching Sarah various "atomic" components of language. Researchers studying ape language accepted as a given the prevailing working assumption of psycholinguists that human language makes use of two levels September 1985 • American Psychologist Copyright 1985 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 0003-066X/85/$00.75 Vol. 40, No. 9, 1011-1028 1011 of structure: the word and the sentence. In contrast to the fixed character of various forms of animal communicat ion (e.g., bird songs that assert the presence of food or a readiness to mate or bee "dances" that specify the location of a food source with respect to the hive), the meaning of a word is arbitrary. One must keep in mind, however, that even though apes can learn substantial vocabularies of arbitrary symbols, there is no a priori reason to regard such accomplishments as evidence of human linguistic competence. After all, dogs, rats, horses, and other animals can learn to produce arbitrary "words" to obtain spe-