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Language comprehension in ape and child

E S Savage-Rumbaugh, J Murphy, R A Sevcik

    Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development
    |January 1, 1993
    PubMed
    Summary
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    This study compared language comprehension in a child and a bonobo, finding both understood novel sentences and syntactic structures. The bonobo excelled at recursion, while the child was better with conjunctions, suggesting shared cognitive foundations for language.

    Area of Science:

    • Comparative Psychology
    • Linguistics
    • Evolutionary Biology

    Background:

    • Human language acquisition research often prioritizes production over comprehension.
    • Comprehension is increasingly recognized as preceding and guiding production in human language development.
    • Previous research indicates some animal species can process speech sounds categorically, similar to humans.

    Purpose of the Study:

    • To systematically compare the language comprehension skills of a human child and a bonobo.
    • To investigate whether non-human primates possess the cognitive capacity for understanding word-referent relations and syntactic structure.
    • To challenge theories suggesting syntactic processing is uniquely human.

    Main Methods:

    • A 2-year-old child and an 8-year-old bonobo were raised in similar language-rich environments.

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  • Both subjects were exposed to spoken English and lexigrams from infancy via observational learning.
  • Subjects responded to 660 novel sentences without prior training, with responses videotaped and scored for accuracy.

    • Main Results:

    • Both the child and bonobo demonstrated comprehension of novel requests and simple syntactic devices.
    • The bonobo showed higher accuracy in decoding word recursion compared to the child.
    • The child outperformed the bonobo on conjunctive structures, likely due to short-term memory demands.

    Conclusions:

    • The findings suggest that the cognitive capacity for language comprehension may predate speech evolution in hominids.
    • Syntactic processing abilities are not necessarily unique to humans, as evidenced by the bonobo's performance.
    • The evolution of speech may be linked to physical adaptations like bipedalism and changes in the vocal tract, enabling categorical sound production.