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Can Chimps Talk: Can Konzi Go to College - 0 views

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    "MR. HOFFMAN: Konzi is a Benobo, a pygmy chimpanzee. He and his sister, Pambinisha, are the subjects of Doctor Sue Savage Rumbaugh's work. That work is questioning the widely accepted view that only humans are capable of language. For 20 years, she's been studying whether Benobos can learn language, working first with their mother, Matata, back in 1975. SUE SAVAGE-RUMBAUGH, Georgia State University: We were trying to do some very simple things like hold up an apple and teach Matata to hit the symbol for apple, and then we would give her an apple. She learned that. What we wanted then to be able to do was to have her use the symbol for apple whenever she was talking about an apple, whether she was intending to eat it or not, to know in a sense that the symbol represented apple, not just the fact that she was going to get apple. This, she couldn't learn, but fortunately, she had a youngster named Konzi, who was around and was playing while I was trying to teach her, and Konzi did learn, even though we weren't trying to teach him. What we found with Konzi was that simply by watching what we did with his mother, he was able to make this correlation so that he knew that the symbol apple represented apple, whether he got to eat one, whether his mother got to eat one, whether we were saying, no, Konzi, don't eat an apple, it still meant apple. "
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